September 23, 2008 -- Global IT services company Atos Origin today announced that it has selected ADVA Optical Networking to provide highly reliable connectivity between its data centers in Essen and Nuremberg. Atos Origin has deployed the ADVA FSP 2000 to link two critical data centers over fault-tolerant, redundant optical fiber paths. The company is also consolidating all its European mainframe systems in Essen.
Atos Origin operates disaster-proof data centers in Essen and Nuremberg for a number of customers in the travel, tourism, and other industries that require high standards of fault tolerance. In addition to redundant routing between its data center locations, the company has deployed fully loaded ADVA FSP 2000 DWDM systems with 64 wavelengths to provide the requisite degree of disaster protection.
"We haven't experienced a single second of outage since we deployed these systems," reports Cees de Jong, senior vice president managed operations for Atos Origin Germany, Austria and Poland. "It was clearly the right decision."
The equipment has also proven to be powerful and flexible, say Atos Origin representatives. ADVA Optical Networking's FSP 2000 supports all the protocols and applications commonly used in today's data center. In addition to the 1- and 10-Gbit/sec Ethernet and 2- and 4-Gbit/sec Fibre Channel connectivity used by Atos Origin, these include IBM-specific protocols needed for real-time mainframe connectivity in Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (GDPS) solutions.
At its Essen location, Atos Origin is also consolidating all of its European mainframe systems from multiple countries in an effort to reduce management and operating expenses. In addition to the savings on the server side, ADVA says its FSP 2000 platform is contributing to cost reductions via significantly lower power requirements and a smaller footprint in comparison with competitors' systems. According to Atos Origin, the equipment from ADVA Optical Networking has reduced energy consumption by 18%.
"As a company, we are committed to protecting the environment and want to offer our customers solutions that preserve resources to the greatest extent possible," says de Jong. "The outstanding energy efficiency of the FSP 2000 was an important factor in our decision to choose ADVA Optical Networking. The FSP 2000 consumes less power and produces less heat--both significant cost and environmental factors."
"With energy costs and environmental awareness both on the rise, power efficiency is becoming an increasingly important concern for many of our customers," agrees Christian Illmer, senior director business development enterprise at ADVA Optical Networking. "Our company has always had a strong portfolio in this regard, and not just since the general hype surrounding green IT began. We have consistently paid attention to the energy balance of our products during the development phase," he reports, "and the technology we offer enables users to deploy energy-efficient solutions into their networks."
On the Web:
www.advaoptical.com
www.atosorigin.com