Johannesburg, 19 Feb 2010
FirstRand Bank, one of South Africa's largest banking institutions, has completed a groundbreaking project to consolidate four separate data centres at its Sandton Merchant Place Campus into one location, effecting greater operational efficiencies and cost savings, while dramatically reducing its carbon footprint.
This project involves rolling out a high efficiency, green data centre to address the power, cooling, security, location, connectivity and redundancy needs of four businesses with Dimension Data's Advanced Infrastructure Solutions working in tandem with APC by Schneider Electric.
Previously, FirstRand had operated four data centres serving four distinct businesses located in Sandton in four separate locations within three different buildings. Three of the four existing server rooms had not been originally designed as server rooms and so had significant efficiency, cooling and power consumption flaws. All four server rooms had grown within the different business groups and competed with them for valuable office space, which was at a premium cost.
The inefficiencies inherent in this unstructured model meant not only that costs were mounting in an uncontrolled manner, but that the risk of a major systems failure was unacceptably high. The management and upgrading of all four data centres had become a monolithic and wasteful task, with many processes overlapping, being repeated, and with no capacity to accommodate future growth.
Dimension Data implemented a range of APC by Schneider Electric solutions at FirstRand, with all elements of the solution designed to provide an open and flexible architecture. Hot scaleable power systems, close coupled cooling, high density computing and security and access control technology were all features of the design. A high-density rack layout with APC's NetShelter enclosures was implemented, as well as comprehensive power, cooling, and connectivity solutions and the installation of InfraStruXure Central software provided the manageability function for FirstRand to efficiently monitor the entire physical infrastructure.
The 2N redundant power and cooling requirement of this data centre is met not only by the cooling solution installed, but also by two multi-module redundant Galaxy 7000 UPS systems, which allow for uninterrupted future power upgrades to meet expected growth.
According to Nicolas Shaw at Dimension Data Advanced Infrastructure: "To kick off, we were tasked with gathering information for FirstRand, including a list of servers and their possible locations, the number of transformers feeding the building and the possibility of tapping off chilled water from the existing chiller units. We also had to investigate how the company could expand its data centre as its needs grow in the future."
There were a number of challenges that had to be overcome to ensure the success of this large-scale project. Security and access, the trend for partitioning, the limited physical space available, high-density cooling and the consolidation of connectivity were all critical issues that needed to be solved.
"The result thus far, however, is a truly green data centre with a greatly minimised carbon footprint, that is stable, flexible and scalable enough to adapt to FirstRand's future IT needs," says Rodney Callaghan, VP: Southern Africa at APC by Schneider Electric. "The organisation can also upgrade or perform maintenance within a live environment, meaning constant availability.
"InfraStruXure Central software enables FirstRand to efficiently monitor its entire physical infrastructure. This centralised repository of information can be accessed by multiple users from anywhere on the network, creating a consolidated view of the physical infrastructure," he adds.
By using a high-density rack design with APC's NetShelter enclosures, the data centre footprint has been kept to a minimum and FirstRand has saved on valuable real estate in its rapidly expanding business, where office space is at a premium. As Shaw explains: "We started out with a data centre using more than 260 racks in total, and managed to trim this down to 113 racks with proper power, cooling, connectivity and manageability, with an almost Tier 4 type topology, which has left FirstRand with plenty of room for future expansion within the available space."
"The systems failure risk was one of our greatest driving forces for this implementation," says Nick Smith, property infrastructure manager at FirstRand. "Not only have we now mitigated this, but FirstRand has also freed up valuable office space for future expansion as well as saving on management costs as only one team is now needed to manage the data centre.
"FirstRand had previously used some smaller APC solutions in one of the former data centres and had found the products to be highly reliable. When we heard about the rest of the APC offerings and their green benefits, effectiveness and potential cost savings, it really was a 'no brainer' to go this route."
At this stage, around 40% of kit has been migrated to the new data centre and the project is set for completion by mid 2010.
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