Agile Digital

About Schneider Electric

Schneider Electric is a Fortune 500 leader in energy systems management, automation and sustainability. This global player offers energy distribution, management and efficiency solutions from the power station to the power plug. Its StruxureWare technology manages $100M’s of data centre equipment worldwide.

Background

Schneider Electric’s StruxureWare Data Centre Expert (DCE) is a software platform for managing the plethora of devices in a modern data centre. This platform operates at a ~99.999% reliability in orchestrating critical infrastructure.

Schneider Electric’s IT Business has engaged Agile Digital multiple times for our capability to develop reliable and secure “big data” platforms. We were initially tasked with designing and developing data integration appliances to be deployed within smart buildings. This was to help data centre operators in Australia get the most value from their StruxureWare DCE (Data Centre Expert) investment.

Mission

Schneider Electric needed a software solution to securely integrate their DCE platform with smart building management systems. The goal was to achieve effective monitoring and reporting of the energy efficiency, systems uptime, and reliability across all smart building systems.

The critical nature of a data centre leaves little margin for software error. Agile Digital were trusted to develop the reliable and secure software needed to integrate data centre management systems within a broader smart building.

Our mission was to ensure all data-integration solutions offered real-time transformation of bulk data feeds with a very high level of information security compliance. This demanded that we design and develop an enterprise-grade, and highly efficient, data integration appliance for smart buildings.

Approach

Agile Digital’s first delivery for Schneider Electric was to integrate the StruxureWare data centre platform with a modern Building Management System (BMS). A BMS platform manages building devices in real-time, from lighting, to elevators, to temperature control, ventilation and fire control. This work involved a range of complex challenges to overcome including data integrations using the low-level BACNet protocol.

We successfully developed a high reliability software appliance to communicate securely between the StruxureWare platform and the Building Management System. This was achieved with low-level services protocols to continually extract data from smart building systems.

Data centre deployment was achieved via a staged approach that achieved real-time data transfer and monitoring without any interruption to data centre service.

Outcome

Agile Digital’s development team worked closely with Schneider Electric stakeholders to deliver several data integration appliances:

• Connectedness & Security with the Multi-Protocol Connector (MPC): this software appliance was designed and developed to continuously extract data from the plethora of devices in highly-secure data centre buildings without risk of a data breach.
• Visibility & Control with the StruxureWare Insights Portal (SIP): this monitoring dashboard was created with real-time data feeds to provide visibility and trend reporting across data centre health, environmental metrics, and building maintenance issues.
• Manageability with Hardware Appliances: each software solution was designed and deployed by Agile Digital as a dedicated hardware appliance to deliver a low-maintenance solution for smart buildings.

These solutions were first deployed within a secure government agency and a major Australian retail bank. Agile Digital has supported and extended these solutions to ensure operation was seamless, and facilities staff had the tools and training to get the most value from this technology.