The datacenter is now based on the Teratec Campus, an ideal location to launch collaborative High-Performance Computing (HPC) projects as it is in the vicinity of Europe's biggest HPC center: the CEA's "Tr?s Grand Centre de Calcul". The new datacenter will effectively act as ESI's PoD (Point of Delivery), serving all ESI offices across Europe as a platform for ESI's new software development and engineering services alike. ESI teamed up with Legrand, the global specialist in electrical and digital building infrastructures to meet the technical challenges surrounding this project.
For years, Legrand has been supplying integrated solutions for lighting, energy, networks, and access management in buildings. Present in more than 80 countries with a workforce of over 36,000, the Group's mission is to design, develop, and market electrical and digital systems that are both simple and innovative. Since 2009, Legrand has intensified its activity in the UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) sector, as required for efficiently operating datacenters aimed at supporting HPC activities, especially with the acquisition of S2S in France.
To build its new datacenter at Teratec, ESI worked with Legrand Datacenter Solutions, a branch specialized in delivering adequate answers to the numerous challenges inherent to supercomputing: from energy efficiency to cooling, security, and scalability. ESI also teamed up with Minkels, a company belonging to the Legrand Group and specializing in datacenter hardware, including housing, UPS, cooling, monitoring and power distribution solutions, together with their partner Cap Ingelec, strong of 20 years' experience in data centers.
"In most buildings, the economic and/or safety and security issues necessitate reliable availability of energy and data and the costs associated with a loss of operation can be very substantial," comments Pascal Perrin, Datacenter Business Development Manager at Legrand. "Our solutions ensure the electrical and digital supply of the data center at all times." Continuous availability of power supply is of uttermost importance to make sure ESI can run large HPC calculations smoothly, as required to deliver projects at the right time to ESI's industrial customers.
Vincent Chaillou, COO, ESI Group, explains: "ESI successfully completed the implantation of its new datacenter, in collaboration with Legrand. Aside of guaranteeing Uninterrupted Power Supply to support our software and services operations, this intelligent infrastructure is set to adapt to ESI's evolving needs and computational loads. It delivers a scalable, adaptable infrastructure, ready to anticipate the next big technological challenges, including Big Data evolutions and the Internet of Things."
Pascal Perrin adds: "In the era of virtualization and cloud computing, a massive increase in the volume of data is expected: the annual growth in data is expected to rise from 50% in 2010 to reach 4400% in 2020[1]. This rapid growth will have a major impact on how we design our server rooms, with scalability becoming vital."
Other devices installed by Legrand include air filters, protecting equipment from dust that tends to overheat hardware, so these can last longer. The datacenter also benefits from Legrand's energy saving technologies, reducing the ecological footprint of ESI's activities, as part of the company's commitment to the environment and future generations.
Marc Daoud, Account Manager at Minkels, explains: "ESI's new datacenter features Minkel's Cold Corridor®. This technology segregates the cold and hot airflows using advanced air conditioning systems. The housing solution uses specific foam joints to make sure it's airtight. Cold air is pulsed into the external alleys to cool down the supercomputers, and comes out hot into the central alley. The level of cold air absorption obtained is optimum, so that temperature variations are kept to a minimum: temperature inside the rack must remain between 22°C and 28°C. All in all, our technology delivers the best possible environment to run effective operations while protecting hardware and ensure its durability."
Vincent Chaillou concludes, "ESI is now equipped with a Cloud Computing PoD to run state of the art calculations, as required to leverage our developments and engineering studies in the field of Virtual Prototyping. This new PoD actively contributes to achievement of ESI's vision: by granting our customers access to HPC and Cloud Computing, and by democratizing the use of such technologies, we propose a new model to our industrial customers - empowering them to deliver disruptive innovations."
