IBM & Rittal partner to provide complete IT infrastructure solutions from banking to mining to government!
June 1, 2018
Today, organizations, especially the midsize ones, often find themselves in a quandary. They need to continually increase IT capacity to support new technologies like cloud, analytics, mobility, and social while improving availability, supporting application growth and meeting new customer and business demands at the same time, they must contain operating and capital costs. Something’s got to give. For many organizations, data centers are the engines that drive the growth of the enterprise. Typically, CIOs have met the demands of a growing business by expanding IT capacity with new equipment. But with power densities growing 20 times the past decade alone, this strategy is creating unsustainable power and cooling requirements in existing data centers. And with future requirements for cloud computing, analytics, mobile and social business applications, it will be increasingly difficult to keep up with the pace of change. Already, continual growth from mergers, acquisitions and geographic expansion has resulted in server sprawl across many server rooms or aging data center infrastructures that are no longer able to meet today’s reliability requirements.
Building a traditional, raised-floor data center is frequently out of the question. The up-front capital expenditures often make new data centers unaffordable. Designing and building a new facility can take months. And the space available for new data centers often constrains the implementation of traditional designs. If an organization can’t build a new data center, it may be forced to install critical IT equipment in unconditioned, unsecured and unmonitored space.
Modular data centers allow for quick and cost-effective implementation for increased server room capacity. We recognize that midsize organizations are typically more agile than larger organizations, with fewer resources and a mandate to do more with less. IBM and Rittal’s innovative approach to data center design and deployment can help organizations design and implement a new server room that can meet availability, capacity and scalability requirements while reducing capital and ongoing operating expenses. Read more.
The Bank: Combining a compact IT landscape with an innovative cooling solution
Bank customers require access to data and services around the clock – even if disaster strikes. To this end, high-availability data centres with effective business continuity mechanisms are key. To achieve highly reliable IT operations in its new, geo-redundant Tier 3 data centres in Switzerland, banking IT enterprise Inventx opted to partner with IBM Resiliency Services and Rittal. As a result, Inventx has saved space and cut its energy costs – and can continue to position itself as a strong IT partner in the financial services industry.
Swiss company Inventx is the IT partner of leading banks and financial institutions. In a recently concluded project, Inventx expanded its IT assets and built new data centres at two locations. Rittal and IBM collaborated within the scope of this undertaking to implement compact, high-availability IT infrastructure. Read more.
“Rittal’s innovative solutions and first-rate IT expertise played a vital role in the implementation of highly reliable, energy-efficient infrastructure. The TS IT racks made installation simple. And the powerful LCP Inline systems enabled us to create a more compact IT environment that we can operate more efficiently,” emphasised Roman Flütsch, Head of Operations at Inventx.
“The success of the Inventx project clearly illustrates the benefits customers receive from our partnership with IBM. In this scenario, we combined a compact IT landscape with an innovative cooling solution – enabling a dense configuration in the IT racks, and reducing the cost of IT operations,” underlines Marcus Fischbach, Director, Global Business Development, IT, at Rittal. Read more.
The Mine: Where the industrial age meets the digital age and the cloud goes underground
Deep underneath Norway’s craggy northwest coast, through tunnels hollowed out by miners decades ago, Rittal and IBM have collaborated to transform a man-made mountain hall into a massive datacenter. At a planned 200 megawatts, Lefdal Mine Datacenter has the potential to become the largest in Europe.
It may also be one of the greenest on the planet, powered by renewable energy and cooled by water from a fjord just south of the mine. And it will be one of the most resilient as well. What could be more secure than sheltering servers under more than a hundred meters of rock? The high-density rock provides natural protection from electromagnetic disruptions, and the single point of entry is concealed in the mountain and secured by a series of steel doors.
This is where the industrial age meets the digital age—and where the cloud goes underground.
The mine was once a source for olivine, a dense mineral used in casting aluminum and steel because of its high melting point. But the mine has sat empty and nearly invisible for the last few decades. For Lefdal’s owners—a group of local residents and farmers who own the land above the mine—it was hard to visualize what to do with all that underground space. The idea came about about a decade ago when the mine’s former CEO was on a hike: why not take advantage of the natural security of the existing structure, as well as Norway’s cool climate and surplus hydropower, to create a green IT environment for the 21st century? This is recycling, reusing and reimagining on a very grand scale. Read more.
Rittal has deployed specially designed ‘Standard Modules’ as a housing solution, tailor-made for the Lefdal Mine Datacentre. The modules consist of server racks, raised floor, LCPs, PDR racks and network racks. They fit either into IT containers, dedicated data halls or in security rooms. The modules are created in various sizes and densities. Standardization requires high quality, lower price and short delivery time!
“We can facilitate all known concepts for white space solutions and the facility structure allows a streamlined solution for containers in different shapes and sizes including customized power density, temperature, humidity, and operational equipment. Thanks to our technology partners Rittal and IBM for their contribution along the entire build-out process, and for providing their global leading solutions and services into our ecosystem”, explained Jørn Skaane, CEO at Lefdal Mine Datacenter. Read more.
Public Sector Client, East Coast US: Adaptive Edge solution for legacy building environments
Gartner has stated that edge computing will present value where localized computing power is necessary. As IoT decentralizes computing infrastructures of organizations, edge computing could be advantageous, compared to cloud or centralized computing. The adoption of IoT in the public sector could not only grow, but could very well revolutionize the way in which data is distributed, processed and analyzed.
A US public sector client faced challenges in deploying new technologies for literally hundreds of end users, with many challenges to address in their legacy IT environments. Existing spaces were limited in size and, as is, were not suitable for the resilient IT solutions needed. Creation of new spaces was not an option, and solutions were deployed in 100-year-old buildings where multiple small IT rooms had to be consolidated in a way that would allow for future growth. Roughly 300 locations were involved on extremely aggressive schedules and migration from old to new technology was required to be
seamless and non-disruptive to current operations.
Working together, Rittal and IBM – along with the client – thought outside the IT box for solutions to this myriad of challenges. Because of the age and nature of the available IT spaces, the team adapted solutions to the project requirements from the Rittal product portfolio that were originally developed for industrial applications. No two installations were exactly the same, so standard components that could be easily assembled were utilized for this industrial IoT type solution. In rooms where house ventilation was available, vented IT cabinets were used; in areas that did not offer any conditioned air, fully enclosed and self-contained cabinets were equipped with integrated cooling units. All cabinets offered the unique feature of a roof-top part that allowed live network switches to be mounted in place from their original locations with no interruption to data flowing through the network. The end result is highly robust and resilient IT environments that are secure and can be scaled for future growth.
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Where you can find the IBM-Rittal North American team!
On May 2018, Rittal and IBM collaborated to showcase their joint solutions at CAPre’s Data Centre Symposium in Toronto at the Marriott Eaton Centre. Rittal and IBM key players from Canada and the US convened to develop strategy and introduce the market to what promises to be an advantageous partnership across the IT industry in North America.
On June 14, IBM and Rittal will once again present a joint front at ‘The Best Data Centre Event in Canada’: The Great Canadian Data Centre Symposium at McMaster Innovation Park, Hamilton. This venue is near and dear to the partners, as Rittal has deployed their Data Solutions at the McMaster University in Hamilton!
Followed by that, IBM and Rittal will once again showcase their Data Centre Solutions at DCD Toronto on Nov 13.
Contact IT@rittal.ca for more info or visit www.rittal.ca
