American Power Conversion (APC), has announced that Interxion has partnered with the company in its BLADE READY program (www.BladeReady.com). The program was introduced to help enterprises plan and implement high density applications such as blade servers.
Interxion is a leading provider of premium carrier-neutral data centers, colocation and managed services in Europe. With 22 operational data centres across eleven European countries, Interxion already supports 1,000 customers including enterprises, ISPs, carriers, content providers, mobile service providers, hosting and telecommunications companies. As partners in the BLADE READY program, the company is building its credentials to power and cool high density computing solutions.
The BLADE READY program unites APC with vendors of complementary network-critical physical infrastructure (NCPI) technologies and service partners, to deliver comprehensive interoperable products, solutions, and services for blade NCPI environments. Together, BLADE READY members help enterprises assess, design, procure, stage, implement and interconnect blade servers and related equipment. Members in this program include a group of strategic, best-in-class hardware and software vendors that help enable operational excellence and unsurpassed compatibility with blade network environments.
"The continued trend of increasing power density creates a number of challenges for commercial datacentre managers. Not the least of these is ensuring adequate power and cooling to meet stringent uptime SLAs." said Chriss Fortier-Rolfe, BLADE READY program director at APC. "The program helps assess an organisation's readiness to implement a blade environment and can help develop a roadmap for a smooth transition to blades resulting in operational excellence."
According to industry research firm Gartner, Inc., worldwide blade server annual shipments are expected to reach 1.2 million by 2009. Gartner expects annual shipments of all servers to reach seven million by 2009. To take advantage of the technology trend, the BLADE READY program offers a single stop for a wide variety of resources including APC's Blade Readiness Assessment Service, which is a first step in understanding the right approach to these challenges. Also available are white papers, build out guides, total cost of ownership (TCO) planning guides, and more. Interxion recently announced an additional 13MW of power to be distributed between 2,200m┬▓ of already facilitated data centre space, with an additional 3,000m┬▓ to be facilitated in the near future. The decision by Interxion to make significant financial commitment to deliver up to 3kW/m┬▓ was driven by the fast growing demand to adopt new hardware technologies, which dramatically increase processing power (and number of CPUs) per cabinet footprint, and boost power requirements up to 20kW per cabinet footprint.
"As the adoption of blade servers has become increasingly popular, we have seen a steady increase with over 300 high density server environments deployed at our 22 locations across Europe," said Anthony Foy, Group Managing Director of Interxion. "This has given a high level of expertise and enabled us to design, build and deploy the highly specialised infrastructure needed to meet the power and cooling requirement needed to meet high density requirements. Joining the BLADE READY program will be allows us share our expertise with our peer group."
For more information about the BLADE READY program, please visit www.BladeReady.com or call +44 (0) 118 903 7827. For more information about APC's BLADE READY products and solutions, please visit www.apc.com/gb or call +44 (0) 118 903 7800.