Multinational Atos chooses Minkels Free Standing Cold Corridor
Atos has 93,000 employees in 72 countries to supply its IT services – including managed services – to different types of customers, such as multinationals, (health) insurance companies, telecom companies, banks, government agencies, hospitals and industrial companies. In the Netherlands Atos manages four data centres that, since 2009, have been equipped with Minkels solutions – including racks, (Next Generation) Cold Corridors®, intelligent Power Distribution Units (PDUs), cable management systems and data centre accessories.
DATA CENTRE IN BEST, THE NETHERLANDS
One of the most prominent Atos data centres in the Netherlands is located in Best. This data centre houses the Atos Canopy Cloud, the Dutch HUB of the cloud platform that is available worldwide. The data centre has 2,500 square metres of floor space, is located in a highly secured complex and has an average scalable capacity of 6 KW per rack. The low energy Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of the data centre, with an annual average value of 1.3 at current usage levels, illustrates the tremendous importance that Atos attaches to sustainability and energy savings. Atos is currently working on implementing more optimisations.
In 2014 Atos noticed that it was becoming more difficult to house racks with built-in storage appliances in an energy-efficient manner. The racks from Bull, IBM, Oracle and EMC, each one with different measurements, no longer fit properly in the Minkels Cold Corridors the company had been using at the time. “Just at the right moment Minkels came out with the Free Standing Cold Corridor, which enabled us to create fully sealed corridors that we could fill over time, no matter the size of the racks,” says Kees de Klein, data centre specialist at Atos. “As soon as we saw the demo model, we knew that was what we needed and we purchased the solution right away. I have yet to see another supplier o er this type of innovative product.
“Storage appliances cost a lot of money,” emphasises De Klein. “This type of appliance can cost anywhere from 500,000 to 1.5 million euros. You want to be able to deploy this type of equipment quickly, preferably in an energy-efficient and sustainable environment that will bene t the performance and lifetime of the equipment. The Free Standing Cold Corridor significantly reduces the deployment time for these storage appliances, while the Cold Corridor provides the right, constant cooling environment and saves energy right from the very first day. The First Free Standing Cold Corridor is almost full and we are very pleased with it. We now want to expand the solution even more.”
PARTNERSHIP
The partnership with Minkels is important for Atos when it comes to a robust layout of its data centres. Atos is not only active in the Netherlands, but also in France and the United Kingdom. “A lot of data centre management activities take place remotely these days, often from di erent countries,” says Marc Sanders, Manager Data Centres Benelux and Nordics at Atos. “Standardisation is crucial in this case. It reduces the worktime in the data centre and you don’t have to maintain stock of as many spare parts. The Minkels solutions are high quality and modular, which means that they are always a good fit and we would like to see them as the standard solution. Even in interim tenders over the past few years, Minkels always had the best submission.”
The fact that the Minkels engineers are proactively working with Atos to come up with solutions is an important part of the partnership according to Sanders. Sanders: “It is de nitely important to me. We appreciate being able to bene t from the knowledge shared by Minkels. For instance, they help us think through the process of determining air volumes in a Cold Corridor, for example in the Atos cloud environment. They also help us with air optimisation creating business cases and calculating a ROI. It is a huge benefit that we can work so well with Minkels.”
