Puteaux, France – 28 January 2010 - "In our opinion, the ECO CENTER platform is a true example of NEC's capacity for innovation. Thanks to this solution, we offer businesses the ability to reduce their operational costs and invest in a product designed according to the group's sustainable development policy: low energy consumption and lightened structure, longer lifespan of components and the solution, reduced and simplified management time," comments Laurent Clerc, NEC's Data Centre solutions manager.
How to meet the Data centre challenge?
The growth in hosting servers containing critical data, energy and space savings are crucial challenges for Data centres. The NEC Express5800/ECO CENTER meets these challenges by offering a solution which combines:
- A platform dedicated to virtualisation which marries power and a reduction in energy consumption
- The SigmaSystemCenter(SSC) operating tool to optimise energy consumption and simplify solution administration
- An "in the rack" Data centre architecture to ease network and storage integration.
Goal 1: reduce electricity consumption
Designed to reduce both electricity consumption and footprint. This solution has been designed to enable easy, and therefore less costly, cooling: thanks to an open structure, optimised architecture and concentrated cabling, the flow of air is naturally more fluid.
NEC has also chosen components with a reduced thermal footprint and low power consumption (energy saving chipset, SSD cards to replace power hungry hard disks, 60w processors…). Finally, its 80PLUS GOLD certified high performance power supplies allow an electricity conversion rate of 92 %, against 70-80% for traditional power supplies.
Goal 2: allow simplified, flexible administration
Businesses are always looking for profitable solutions which guarantee better productivity. To meet this need, NEC has decided to include ‘SigmaSystemCenter’ in the platform. This unique software suite enables:
- rapid management of virtual and physical machine deployment,
- dynamic monitoring and optimisation of physical and virtual server load,
- movement of virtual machines or automatic increase in their capacity,
- shutting down of unused physical machines,
- administration of all servers at the same time when updating applications.
"With this solution, businesses benefit from a high availability, secure platform. Finally, simplified management enables a reduction in the number of human resources required", explains Laurent Clerc.
Goal 3: Allow modular, long lasting investment
In its simplified form, NEC therefore offers a modular platform which adapts to company needs. Thus, it is possible
- to buy servers as and when needed in the form of a 2 standard server module, which is easy to install and administer,
- to install storage and network switches with around forty servers,
- to load the bay with 80 servers
- All this in an NEC bay or a standard bay.
In its integrated version, NEC offers an onboard IT/Network platform enabling them to deliver a complete turnkey system which is ready to use containing storage, virtualisation, network connection and administration and which can be expanded by adding bays as required.
This platform is the cornerstone of a number of solutions which will soon be offered by NEC to meet the different needs of Data Centres, and their technological development is already planned up to 2013.
NEC's research and development in this field is driven by its worldwide network experience and its control of the management of Data centres and SaaS solutions in several countries.
Finally, optimisations in terms of cooling and flows have been obtained, in particular in a 25M2 Mini data centre created specifically for research, which obtains a PUE of 1.56. This Data centre is also a showcase and has already had over 200 client visits in one year.
Already available, the NEC Express5800/ECO CENTER is compatible with all operating systems and virtualisation systems from Citrix, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, VMware.