Schneider Electric > Case Studies > Bridging the digital divide

Bridging the digital divide

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Customer Company Size
Mid-size Company
Region
  • Pacific
Country
  • Australia
Product
  • EcoStruxure IT Expert
  • EcoStruxure Asset Advisor
  • InRowTM DX cooling units
  • EcoAisle containment system
  • LV switchboards and breakers
Tech Stack
  • IoT
  • Data Centres
  • Remote Access
  • Solar Inverter
  • Prefabricated Infrastructure
Implementation Scale
  • Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
  • Cost Savings
  • Customer Satisfaction
  • Productivity Improvements
  • Environmental Impact Reduction
Technology Category
  • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
  • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Applicable Industries
  • Telecommunications
  • Utilities
Applicable Functions
  • Logistics & Transportation
  • Maintenance
Use Cases
  • Remote Asset Management
  • Energy Management System
  • Infrastructure Inspection
Services
  • Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
  • System Integration
  • Testing & Certification
About The Customer
Leading Edge Data Centres is an Australian company founded in 2018 with a mission to bridge the digital divide in regional Australia. The company provides businesses and communities with greater access to stable, reliable, and cost-effective connectivity. It aims to do this through a ground-breaking initiative involving a network of lights-out, highly automated data centres. Leading Edge Data Centres’s potential customers have previously suffered through connectivity outages costing them up to $160,000 a year, according to an ITWire report. Leading Edge Data Centres is committed to an uptime promise which can save its customers up to 80% of that cost.
The Challenge
Leading Edge Data Centres wanted to bring stable, reliable, cost-effective connectivity to regional Australia. The company needed a technology partner that could design and build a reliable prefabricated and certified edge data centre, which could be replicated quickly in multiple regional sites around Australia. The team was also looking for a company that could provide a network of engineers to support these sites into the future. A huge challenge for Leading Edge Data Centres is that the distance between its sites makes cost-effective, in-person monitoring almost impossible. Furthermore, most of its sites are greenfield locations, and as a result, power infrastructure is limited. For these reasons, it needed a reliable solution, backup redundancies, and remote access. Leading Edge Data Centres also required an energy monitoring system to accurately track and report in real time the usage of hundreds of customers.
The Solution
To ensure rapid deployment and ultra-reliable operation, Leading Edge Data Centres chooses to utilize Schneider Electric prefabricated data centre infrastructure. The data centres are designed, built, and tested in Australia before they are shipped to site. This removes many of the traditional construction complications and ensures each new Leading Edge Data Centres facility is designed with the same quality, durability, and reliability as the last. As well as reliability, Leading Edge Data Centres required a solution that was efficient and robust. With this in mind, Schneider Electric and Leading Edge Data Centres designed a series of edge data centres, each of a size most effective for the community they service. At the Newcastle Edge Data Centre in New South Wales, the solution includes 20 InRow DX cooling units with EcoAisle containment to keep energy usage to a minimum. The EcoAisle solution utilizes Active Flow Control to maximize the cooling systems’ efficiency by balancing airflow and eliminating pressure differences inside the aisle.
Operational Impact
  • Improved connectivity and reliability for Leading Edge Data Centres customers
  • Cost-effective network rollout of prefabricated certified edge
  • Accessibility and choice – by providing greater choice of direct cloud access, customers can enjoy faster connectivity through the network of edge data centres across regional Australia.
  • Stability and reliability – secure, Tier III certified edge data centres are built to withstand even the toughest of extreme Australian weather conditions, providing redundancy and fault tolerance, as well as power outage protection. The data centre buildings have an expected lifespan of 50 years.
  • Benefits to regional Australia – measurable benefits to local and national customers including improved connectivity, competitive hosting, and the ability to develop IoT and smart cities across Australia through innovative growth infrastructures.
Quantitative Benefit
  • The Leading Edge Data Centres facility has been designed to operate at an efficient PUE of 1.3. However, it is expected that once the site is optimized it will operate at a PUE of 1.2.
  • Leading Edge Data Centres is also undertaking a Carbon Offset Program to achieve net zero carbon emissions, and is working towards NABERS energy efficiency certification for its company headquarters.

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