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Mr. Taylor Man
Vice President
NTT Com Asia
NTT Com Asia Limited, established in 1999 in Hong Kong, is a wholly owned subsidiary of NTT Communications Corporation. As a key arm of NTT Communications' Asia operations, NTT Com Asia has devoted its best effort to becoming the premiere ICT Solution Partner and the communications gateway for global business to develop and manage their operations in Hong Kong and Greater China, offering the best global network services, IP connectivity, data centre, hosting and various ICT services in the region.
Their new Hong Kong Data Centre is a premium installation that official launched in March 2009. As a dedicated Tier III+ data center, it offers unmatched scalability and resiliency, using optimal power and cooling systems and every aspect of the facility is fully redundant to ensure business continuity.
With ISO/IEC 27001:2005 certified operations, the data center offers full spectrum of managed data centre and hosting services. The seven-storey building has a total gross area of 212,100 square feet, providing space for more than 3,000 racks of after it is fully equipped.
The Data Center provides direct connection to NTT Communications Tier 1 IP Backbone, which tops unbeatable speed and stability in connectivity. It is also carrier neutral with up to 95% geographical coverage in Hong Kong.
Since today's ultra-thin, powerful servers require 24/7 air conditioning, the Hong Kong Data Centre has cooling systems that support exceptionally high power density up to12kVA per rack.
In the spring of 2009, NTT Com Asia deployed NEC's ECO CENTER server in order to consolidate servers and deliver better performance and service for their customers.
The engineers in charge of developing and operating the Hong Kong Data Centre had two challenges: maximizing space and reducing power consumption.
NEC ECO CENTER satisfies both challenges, and is a future-ready solution. The installed ECO CENTER optimizes and reduces power consumption through advanced hardware and support for a virtualization environment.
The rising cost of a kilowatt of electricity compounded the challenge (along with space-utilization issues).
Says Taylor Man, VP, Solution & Product Development, NTT Com Asia, "Power cost and space are two of our major cost components for our data center and hosting business. NEC ECO CENTER helps us to reduce space and power cost. Using NEC is a very logical move for us."
With the completion of the Hong Kong Data Centre, NTT Com Asia signaled its commitment to growth. This is part of a transformational shift, not only to higher quality and greater capacity, but also to provide one-stop data center services under the company's concept of enterprise services that enable customers to access from anyplace, anytime using their secure SaaS (software-as-a-service) solutions.
The Hong Kong Data Centre was purposely built for future expansion. All of the facilities were designed for scalability - the building can accommodate up to 3,000 racks.
Every item has Tier III+ (99.982% available) full redundancy (power, air conditioning, telecommunications, etc.), and has multiple-source and multi-path design to ensure business continuity. Plus, multiple levels of physical access for security.
NTT Com Asia chose NEC for their one-stop professional services, from NEC products and technologies, to consultation.
Says Taylor Man: "We have been working with NEC for a long time, and the experience is always pleasant. NEC consistently has the innovative products to help us face business challenges."
NTT Com Asia had conservatively estimated that it would take four years to fill the initial planned capacity; but based on current demand for high-quality data center services, they now believe the first phase of the center will be fully occupied within two years.
The higher than expected growth reflects the increasing trend of outsourcing in Hong Kong, and especially important, the demand for a data center that can provide high electrical power density. The high level of power requirements is the core design criteria for the new data center, and is almost five times higher than the norm back in 2001.
When it comes to reducing server energy consumption, it is more efficient to focus on the data center as a whole rather than individual server installations.
In modern data center, one of the most important thing is to maximize the processing power in the given facility.
However, increasing server density result in power and cooling issue.
NEC ECO CENTER, designed specifically for the data center purpose with the unique rack-based design, provides the optimum solution for both density, and power and cooling issue.
The energy-saving ECO CENTER server solution contains 30 servers, or 120 cores.
Thanks to a hardware configuration using server modules with improved power utilization, and virtualization technology, which consolidates virtual servers and realizes more efficient operational loads, ECO CENTER enables energy savings through optimized power efficiency.
NEC ECO CENTER is the best platform for power efficiency, consolidation and virtualization technology. These are the technical components for the new type of green data center.
For energy saving, ECO CENTER uses cutting-edge components that include the low-voltage Intel Xeon Quad-core CPU, power-saving chipset, and streamlined memory as its energy-saving components. The typical server power conversion rate is usually 70-80%, but ECO CENTER enjoys a much higher-power conversion rate of 89%, while decreasing conversion loss. At maximum power, 55% less energy is consumed. Efficiency is improved under both peak- and off-peak loads.
ECO CENTER's optimized cooling efficiency is archived through by enhancing the mounting design of server modules, maximizing the front and rear-panel aperture ratios, and consolidating external connection cables on the back of the rack in a high-density configuration. These improvements minimize power requirements for cooling fans.
ECO CENTER's loading capacity per unit is improved to 500kg/m² for 512 cores. Using an aluminum chassis and reducing the number of structural components achieves this weight reduction for server modules.
Additionally, ECO CENTER enables efficient operation by managing appropriate workloads with virtualization technology and virtual server consolidation. Hot spots have been eliminated, and cooling efficiencies improved.
Platform management software enables the virtualization technology to help save more energy. NEC SigmaSystemCenter maintains the most appropriate workload, as determined by the virtualization technology. As a result, ECO CENTER executes continuous and autonomous server deployment.
With ECO CENTER, NEC delivers a platform with both high density and energy savings.
The NEC ECO CENTER also helps support a new service, Enterprise Virtual Office Hosting, which was launched in September 2009.
Users can remotely and securely access their office environment to check email, access files and launch applications at any time.
This enables NTT Com Asia to expand their business while offering users a virtual office environment.
How NTT Com Asia defined success was important to designing and equipping the Hong Kong Data Centre. "There are different sides of success that we value. Seeing satisfied customers running a more efficient IT environment is one. Helping our environment to reduce our carbon footprint is also something we're proud of," says Taylor Man.
Tatsunori Shibata
Senior Manager
IT Platform Global Business Development Division
NTT Com Asia was a relatively new customer for NEC. We learned that NTT Com Asia was planning to introduce a new service, virtual hosting in Asia using its Hong Kong Data Centre infrastructure - and needed a cost-efficient server platform. Virtualization technology was extremely important, along with hardware specifications for lower-power consumption and space efficiency. These technologies would help NTT Com Asia be extremely competitive in a very competitive market.
We stressed the benefits of virtualization that NTT Com Asia would realize, over and above the hardware architecture and features.
The selected platform was our ECO CENTER server, which boasts a very simple modular architecture. ECO CENTER server features energy and space efficiency advantages that achieve around 50% reduction in power consumption, and a reduction in footprint and weight. The innovations are important in the cloud computing era, and helps NTT Com Asia provide a solution.
Because this was our first big data center project in Asia, it took us almost one month until the system went into full operation. Adding to the deliberate deployment were the constraints of working in a strictly guarded and secured data center environment. There was little flexibility during installation. However, the entire launch was nearly glitch-free.
Most instructive was seeing the validation of NEC products and services in the Asia Pacific market. The Express5800 servers provide us with confidence about product quality and technology. Especially concerning cloud computing, we need to focus on technology for these new services.
NEC excels in creating a platform virtualization environments based on its advanced management software and server hardware. This has enabled NEC to provide NTT Com Asia with an immediate solution that improves their cost structure.
NTT Com Asia is a very reliable data center partner, so NEC will be cooperating with them to expand our global cloud business by leveraging their infrastructure.
We already enhanced the first generation of ECO CENTER so that it now provides faster processing power, improved density and higher cost performance.
Stay tuned.
| Type of business | Tier III+ Premium Data Center |
|---|---|
| Address | Tai Po, Hong Kong |
| Established | 2009 |
(Aug 27, 2009 )
"With our hosting solutions, such as Virtualization as a Service, we need innovative products and solutions to help us to face business challenges."