Rittal announced on Wednesday commitment to its global partnership with ABB to provide edge data center solutions for industrial organizations. Rittal’s collaboration with ABB on secure edge data centers continues to grow, including through the annual ABB Customer World event in Houston.
The alliance also covers various solutions and services including those for uninterruptible power supply (UPS), secure edge data center solutions with fire protection, edge data centers for OEM manufacturers, scalable modular data centers as well as new power container solutions.
These prefabricated and resilient data center solutions – such as the recently launched Secure Edge Data Center (SEDC) with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) – are purpose-built for harsh industrial environments to help digitize operations, which will allow customers to run enterprise-grade IT in close proximity to their operational technology environments, machines and equipment to enable low-latency, secure and reliable digital processes.
Modern edge data centers are essential for data-driven economies, where the Internet of Things are generating a massive amount of data. An edge data center brings IT capacity closer to the place of data generation to enable low-latency, secure and reliable digital processes needed for many Industry 4.0 scenarios.
As a global organization, Rittal prides itself on its progressive approach to engineering. Rittal North America’s manufacturing center of excellence facility in Urbana, Ohio, consists of more than a half-million square feet of space to ensure that customers’ production and stocking requirements are fully met.
Rittal’s and ABB’s global strategic alliance was originally announced at DataCloud Europe 2018. Based on their proven partnership in the uninterruptible power distribution business, both companies aim to expand their solutions approach for modular, secure and high-availability data center infrastructure, primarily in North and South America, Asia and Europe.
Leveraging the joint global network of sales, engineering and service teams of both companies ABB and Rittal focus on the conception and development of modern data centers and edge computing. Rittal and ABB have a history of successful collaboration on projects including the implementation of a new data center at a European airport, establishing a maximum-security and high-efficiency data center for colocation services in a decommissioned mine.
“We are excited to extend our partnership with ABB and HPE to deliver a cost-effective and resilient secure edge data center solution that can operate in harsh, uncontrolled environments where IT applications were not originally intended to operate,” said Mike Freund, managing director for the U.S. at Rittal. “This partnership allows customers to roll in a complete data center solution that can easily scale in size or be replicated globally for a consistent user experience.”
“ABB has supplied UPS systems and electrical distribution solutions to Rittal for some time already and both companies agreed to deepen their partnership on an international level to support their growth strategies in the last few years,” said Lara Cortinovis, global product group manager power protection at ABB. “Rittal not only deploys ABB UPS systems as part of their data center solutions but also leverages local ABB services to strengthen sales activities and services in local markets.”
