The America’s Cup might be the oldest active trophy in international sport, yet it creates one of the most dramatic displays of cutting edge technology in action and now it’s talking big data and data centres...
While much of the excitement and pressure takes place on the water, off the water and out of the limelight there is immense pressure to ensure the smooth management of the team’s heavy-duty data processing needs.
This has become critically important to the teams’ success as the team managers scrutinise reports on wind speed and on-board activity to make decisions in how to improve boat performance.
Vocus Communications, a provider of international networks and data centres throughout New Zealand and Australia, was selected as the official supplier for Emirates Team New Zealand’s data centre requirements back in 2011. The brief was to provide a safe and secure Auckland-based environment where uptime, power density and availability could be fully relied upon.
Nick Holroyd, technical director for Emirates Team New Zealand, explains: “We had a number of essential requirements when housing our Dell HPC solution. This included an unusually high power and cooling density at around 30kW per rack; we could not afford downtime in either installation delay or operational outages; and we needed a high bandwidth, secure connection from our site to the cluster.”
Emirates Team New Zealand was not overstating its requirements and regularly draws 11kW (which is up to three times more than most clients) to feed its power-hungry servers busy crunching huge amounts of data variables for the team with no trouble.
“Not only did Vocus meet all our requirements, but they did so with outstanding levels of pre-install design support and follow-up service,” Holroyd adds.
Vocus NZ sales manager, Steven Stanford, says, “We’re genuinely thrilled to play an integral part in supporting the team’s intensive data processing needs. We like to think our solution matches the same qualities as the boat itself: delivering consistent performance under intense pressure in the most efficient manner possible.”
