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Capgemini moves offices, achieves energy efficiency and flexibility with APC

Present in more than 30 countries, Capgemini reported 2008 global revenues of EUR 8.7 billion and employs 90,000 people worldwide. Capgemini Australia is the local subsidiary of Capgemini, one of the world’s foremost consulting, technology and outsourcing services providers.

Capgemini Australia provides technology services that improve its clients’ business outcomes. The company’s collaborative approach and Rightshore® global delivery model, which balances the best talent from multiple locations around the world, creates delivery excellence for Capgemini’s Australian clients. With particular expertise in the financial services, energy and utility, telecommunications and public sectors, Capgemini Australia has over 750 people servicing its Australian clients.

Capgemini regularly work on client’s needs to assess their technology challenges and determine what product or products are suitable for the company’s challenges. Capgemini then build out the technology architecture and have dedicated outsourcing staff assigned to the business and to maintaining the applications and infrastructure.

Issue/Opportunity

Capgemini has experienced significant growth over the past two years, and the lease on their current office building was about to expire. To support the company’s ongoing growth and increasing IT requirements, the company wanted to re-assess the technology it was using in its current data centre and look at the more advanced technology that was now available for data centres.

Capgemini’s business growth warranted a review of their infrastructure needs and the internal audit found areas in the data centre that needed to be addressed. These included disparate servers, racks and power and cooling solutions that could no longer cope with the IT equipment’s requirements. There was no visibility in the
existing solution for reporting or alerting Capgemini to problems in the data centre. Capgemini also had significant server sprawl due to ageing and legacy servers and infrastructure.

According to Brett Wilson, Senior IT Manager for Capgemini, “our cooling was running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week regardless of what equipment was removed or added. There was no way of telling whether we were under using or over using, we needed a solution that offered right size cooling for our racks”.

The business had already committed to moving to a new building which was a 4.5 star rated ‘smart environmental building’ so the company needed a data centre solution that met the sustainability needs of the new building – it had to offer smart power and cooling that delivered tangible energy efficiency gains.

“When we knew our lease for the current building was up, and we knew we were moving to one of the smart buildings, we seized the opportunity to build a data centre that met our infrastructure needs but that also provided the energy efficiency gains we had previously been missing,” said Wilson.

The challenge in the new building was that the size of the server room was halved which provided a challenge for both infrastructure consolidation and finding the right cooling and power requirements while still allowing Capgemini future growth in the environment.

Solution

The company’s IT team reviewed solutions from several vendors, but according to Brett, only APC was able to offer the flexibility the company needed.

“We engaged APC to assess our capacity, power and cooling requirements and advise the best room design and equipment to suit our specific needs in the new building” said Brett.

Capgemini deployed a turnkey solution from APC to ensure overall accountability from a single vendor for the entire environment from cooling, power and fire detection and suppression.

Capgemini deployed APC’s InfraStruxure solution, an on-demand architecture for network critical physical infrastructure (NCPI). It consists of pre-assembled components including modular and scalable UPS, power distribution units, metered power rails, rack enclosures and cooling units, as well as environmental monitoring.

The InfraStruxure design allows the selection of standardised components to create a solution through modular configurations. This standardisation enables an easily scalable architecture designed to meet changing needs and future expansion.

“APC’s InfraStruxure solution fit our business perfectly, we wanted a solution that meant we could deploy exactly the right infrastructure to support our IT load requirements today but also have clear growth options to accommodate future growth without constraints,” said Wilson.

New building, new capabilities

By implementing the APC InfraStruxure solution Capgemini has now achieved centralised management and ease of maintenance for all Australia wide data centres. The Sydney data centre now has a scalable power, cooling and rack solution that can be expanded easily and costeffectively as the company grows and its infrastructure needs change.

The company reduced its number of racks from 24 to 9 and the amount of physical servers in the new environment was almost halved by consolidating a number of services onto one server and by virtualisation.

The company has also cut its power consumption for UPS and cooling by a third for its server room in the new building.

According to Brett, “APC was able to provide us with a right-sized solution that met our specific needs. It wasn’t just about putting in the most equipment – it wasn’t just
a ‘box sell’ scenario. The team looked at the individual needs of our business and our individual project and provided recommendations that were targeted and going to deliver us results.”

The company is now working with APC to re-vamp their Melbourne data centre based on the success they have seen in Sydney.