The IP55-protected system incorporates cooling and fire suppression from Rittal and a redundant power supply from ABB, with backup power. It comes in a standard IT rack format and is expandable in steps of 5, 10 or 20kW to support increasing workloads. The SEDC and its infrastructure can be monitored and managed remotely across multiple locations to ensure high availability without needing specialised staff on site.
By equipping the SEDC with platforms such as HPE ProLiant for Microsoft Azure Stack, users will be able to deploy Azure applications in the SEDC, or a data centre, or the Azure cloud.
A recent study by the analyst Gartner found that currently about 10% of enterprise-generated data is created and processed outside traditional centralised data centres or the cloud. But, by 2022, it predicts that this figure will have risen to 50%.
The SEDC will be available in September 2018.