Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - Schneider Electric collaborates with Cisco and LEDC

Schneider Electric is helping to connect Australia's regions to the digital future.

The company, a major player in global energy management and automation, has teamed up with technology giants Cisco and Leading Edge Data Centres (LEDC) to roll out a network of prefabricated data centres across regional Australia. The three-way collaboration is now bearing tangible results, with new facilities opening their doors, promising to transform how businesses and communities outside urban centres access digital infrastructure.

Mark De Guara, General Manager for Data Centres at Schneider Electric, described the partnership as a natural progression. "Certainly with Cisco, Schneider Electric's had quite a long-standing relationship over many years in terms of supporting the IT industry," he said. "Both from an infrastructure perspective from Schneider Electric's perspective, and certainly from a networking perspective from Cisco." He explained that this deepened in late 2019, when LEDC approached Schneider Electric for a technology partnership to help deliver their vision of scalable, prefabricated data centres.

As De Guara recalls, "Long story short, Schneider Electric was chosen by Leading Edge then to be their technology partner, and towards the end of 2020, certainly as part of that roll out, Leading Edge required support around the network infrastructure." Enter Cisco, whose expertise in network solutions was the missing piece.

"Cisco, when you look at their capabilities and skill set, matched up exactly with what Leading Edge was requiring," De Guara said. By late 2020, he added, the collaboration had taken shape.

The model is straightforward but ambitious. Leading Edge deploys the physical centres – 75-rack, prefabricated facilities built to the same specification, but tailored to the needs of their host towns. Schneider Electric supplies much of the core technology and infrastructure, including uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), cooling systems, racks, power distribution, monitoring platforms, and digital services. Cisco, meanwhile, provides the entire network backbone within the facilities, enabling regional connectivity through Australia's main telecommunications providers and the national broadband network.

"Connectivity is a key aspect of the regional data centre play and bringing that to regional Australia," De Guara explained.

The pace of progress is brisk. Newcastle welcomed its data centre earlier this year, with Tamworth's site well underway and others in Dubbo and Albury about to follow. De Guara identified each location as a milestone in itself. "Newcastle being opened recently – being the first one that's on site, up and running, clients are moving in – that was a little milestone," he said. "Tamworth is physically on the ground now, due for completion shortly. Dubbo is coming online, it's being pre-fabricated as we speak now, and just due to be completed and rolled to site, and Albury is the next facility."

He said that the project's modular approach allows each town's particular requirements to be addressed, despite the underlying centres being identical in specification. "Each facility has its own, even though they're identical in principle, the locations they're going into are different, so each town has its own requirements and its own idiosyncrasies," De Guara said.

From Schneider Electric's perspective, the project represents more than just supplying equipment. "One of the key things Schneider Electric brings is diversity of our offering," he explained. "If I take the pre-fabricated data centre, fairly well everything inside it is being provided by Schneider Electric – the UPSs, the cooling, the racks, the power distribution, the monitoring platforms, the digital services."

But he stressed the supply of hardware is only part of the story. "Sustainability around environmental aspects in terms of being able to recycle products, the products we develop… the other thing is our regional capability, our support services," De Guara listed. He also noted the company's focus on digital capability and the ability to deliver solutions in real time, even across vast regional distances. "That ability to monitor and support real time and bringing that to the table… looking around those whole sustainability criteria, energy management and that whole diversification of the data centre and the digitisation of the data centre and digitisation of energy as well."

Asked about Schneider Electric's vision for the partnership, De Guara was clear that the ambition goes beyond technological leadership towards social and economic goals for regional Australia. "If I take it back to the fundamentals, Leading Edge came to us with the idea or the concept of bringing the digital economy to regional Australia," he said. "So if I look at Leading Edge's vision, and then say, well, how does Schneider take that vision and then expand it? I think the first very fundamental thing is enabling that vision."

He described the new facilities as proof that, "You can see it in real terms now… data centres on the ground, they're open, and Schneider Electric is enabling that."

Bringing technology to the regions, De Guara said, is about building the facilities in Australia and delivering them to communities previously on the wrong side of the digital divide. "It's that whole life cycle of what Schneider Electric brings," he said.

In practical terms, the collaboration promises more than quick internet or more reliable hosting. For many regional centres, it could mean an acceleration of local digital economies, from digitally enabled health care and education to more robust opportunities for regional businesses and local start-ups.

At the centre of this, De Guara sees Schneider Electric's role as an enabler. "For me the vision in isolation is enabling Leading Edge's vision. So I think at the core of everything we're doing around the partnership is enabling that vision to occur, because ultimately, if Leading Edge is successful, then we're successful, as a flow-on – and as would be the partnership with Cisco as well. For us, it's very much about enabling that," he said.