Raritan and Legrand's Data Communications Division to Show Intelligent Cabinet Concept at DatacenterDynamics Conference

SOMERSET, N.J., March 8, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Legrand's Intelligent Cabinet concept for remote sites will be shown at next week's DatacenterDynamics Conference in New York City at the Legrand booth (#19).  

The working model of the Legrand Intelligent Cabinet concept is designed to monitor and manage, from anywhere, all the IT and integrated infrastructure elements secured in the cabinet, thereby streamlining work, cutting costs, and shifting the focus from managing many elements to managing only one element – the Cabinet.  The paradigm shift to the cabinet or rack as the standard IT unit to manage is expected to make it easier for those centrally located IT and data center professionals responsible for rollouts and uptime in remote locations.

Raritan®, a brand of Legrand, and Legrand's Data Communications Division – which have been working together on developing the Intelligent Cabinet concept – built prototypes to show customers and to learn more about their requirements for distributed IT infrastructures.   

"We built the Intelligent Cabinet as a 'concept car' so that customers can see a working model and provide us feedback," says Henry Hsu, vice president of Product Management and Marketing at Raritan.  "Our goal is to create Intelligent Cabinets that will make it easier, more responsive and cost-effective to support remote sites; and, enable new emerging compute models at the edge to support business transformation.  We want to create the most useful configurations that cut deployment and operations costs."

The renewed interest in remote IT sites -- and in containerized cabinets and micro data centers -- is being driven by the Internet of Things (IoT) and other trends requiring real-time sensor data gathering and analytics crunching to take place at the network edge and in remote offices and branch offices.

IoT and The Legrand Eliot Program
The demo of the Intelligent Cabinet concept comes on the heels of Legrand's recent launch of its Eliot (Electricity + IoT) program in North America.  Eliot is a global Legrand IoT program that brings together Legrand's worldwide expertise to advance connectivity and intelligence in the built environment, mobilize Legrand's capabilities around the world, speed development of Legrand connected devices and amplify communications wherever the Internet of Things can enhance value for all users.   For more information on Eliot, visit legrand.us/eliot.

Intelligent Cabinet at DCD in Booth 19
Typical remote site scenarios and how the Intelligent Cabinet can address them will be shown in Legrand's booth at DCD.  If there is a hot spot near the cabinet, for example, the cabinet's environmental sensors will send alerts to the brains of the cabinet, which will email alerts to the IT staff and will trigger the LED lights outside the cabinet to turn red.  And if there is a security breach, for example, the cabinet will activate cameras to capture images of the unauthorized intruder and send them to the centralized IT staff. 

The unique architecture of the Intelligent Cabinet concept is designed to eliminate redundancy – and related costs – so that the cabinet with intelligence and more capabilities is expected to cost no more than the cabinet components purchased separately.  Deployment and installation time is anticipated to be in weeks instead of months because all the cabinet components are pre-integrated and -tested.

The live demo of the Intelligent Cabinet will be shown March 14-15 in Legrand's Booth 19 at the DatacenterDynamics Conference.  Raritan's data center power solutions -- including new management capabilities – will be shown in Raritan Booth 101.

About the Intelligent Cabinet Concept
Legrand's Intelligent Cabinet leverages the company's data center expertise in cabinet housing of all sizes, intelligent power distribution, power and environmental monitoring, DCIM (data center infrastructure management), cabling, networking, and remote "lights-out" data center management. 

A patent-pending embedded controller provides the intelligence to the cabinet.  The cabinet has its own IP address, and both a remote and cabinet-door touchscreen User Interface to manage all tasks – including security authentication and door-lock release to access the inside of the cabinet, tracking IT and infrastructure assets in the cabinet,  and providing updates on the environment's health, energy usage and potential issues. 

Among the cabinet components are: intelligent power distribution units that meter at the outlet level and can turn off power remotely, a UPS backup system, environmental sensors, asset management, intelligent lighting, and DCIM software.  The self-contained cabinet's built-in security features include smart door locks, smart card access, authentication, cameras, and visual and audible alerts and alarms.  From interoperability to security, the cabinet's open-standards-based architecture is designed to fit into current and future IT environments. 

About Raritan 
Raritan began in 1985 by developing KVM switches for IT professionals to manage servers remotely.  Today, as a brand of Legrand, we are a leading provider of intelligent rack PDUs, KVM switches and other data center infrastructure management solutions.  Our solutions increase the reliability and intelligence of data centers around the globe, including 9 of the top 10 Fortune 500 technology companies.  To learn more visit Raritan.com, LinkedIn or Twitter.

About Legrand, North America
Legrand is a global specialist in electrical and digital building infrastructures. Its comprehensive offering of solutions for use in commercial, industrial and residential markets makes it a benchmark for customers worldwide. Innovation for a steady flow of new products with high added value is a prime vector for growth, including, in particular, connected devices stemming from Legrand's global Eliot (Electricity and IoT) program. Legrand reported sales of $5.3 billion in 2015. Legrand has a strong presence in North and Central America, with a portfolio of well-known product lines that include C2G, Cablofil, Electrorack, Luxul, Middle Atlantic, Nuvo, OCL, On-Q, Ortronics, Pass & Seymour, Pinnacle, QMotion, Quiktron, Raritan, Solarfective, Vantage, Wattstopper, and Wiremold. Legrand is listed on Euronext Paris and is a component stock of indexes including the CAC40, FTSE4Good, MSCI World, ASPI, Corporate Oekom Rating and DJSI (ISIN code FR0010307819) www.legrand.us. 

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SOURCE Raritan and Legrand’s Data Communications Division