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Schneider Electric, the power (and cooling) behind Dell Solution Centres


Dell Solution Centres (DSC) focus on delivering technical customer engagements, building solutions across core domains and industry solutions, ISV certification and sales enablement activities. Each Solution Centre enables prospective customers to experience the full capability of Dell solutions to solve their IT challenges, meet their business requirements and maximise their technology budgets. Says Brian Hayden, Global Infrastructure Lead, Dell.


DRIVEN BY GLOBAL MEGA-TRENDS such as cloud computing, mobility, security and big data, more than 15,000 customer engagements have passed through the Solution Centres during the last three years. Each DSC is supported by an operating data centre in which customer environments can be tested and new solutions evaluated. Brian Hayden is clear about the importance of the facilities: “If we lost a data centre at a decisive time in the customer engagement, it could have a major impact upon a customer project.”


The data centres also provide a showcase for Dell solutions so that customers can evaluate servers, storage and networking equipment in operation as well as judging their effects on the network and physical infrastructure as a whole. The DSC has invested extensively in facilities to ensure maximum uptime for their requirements. “Our customers are always interested in our data centres – what’s in them and how they are run. The challenge of running a reliable and efficient data centre is something they can all relate to,” says Brian Hayden.


Operating Dell Solution Centre Data Centres Working with both facilities and IT teams to deliver a standard set of services to customers, Hayden’s role at Dell gives him a unique appreciation of the pressures on both teams. He works with local organisations to ensure that data centres are built with sufficient power and cooling capacity to support customer engagements, which also includes architecting the infrastructure and, when necessary, upgrading facilities to accommodate latest generation IT equipment. On a daily basis he is responsible for dealing with emerging issues affecting continuity of services, and working alongside a virtual facilities team to resolve any alerts.


“As technology evolves at the hardware level we need smarter infrastructure. Compute nodes have got denser, so has storage equipment. As the devices increase in power density, it puts a strain on the power and cooling capacity available in the data centre,” says Brian Hayden.When we design a solution for a customer we need to look at it from an end-to-end point of view. As we build out the solution we need to consider the full and total cost of ownership, including the data centre. If we shrink the form factor of the device, the power and cooling element doesn’t simply disappear. Just as customers are concerned about the efficiency of each server, they want to know about the power and cooling demand which is about to be placed on their facilities”.


Working with Schneider Electric


At the heart of Dell’s strategic approach is its long term partnership with Schneider Electric, its StruxureWare for Data Centers DCIM and its APC by Schneider Electric InfraStruxure solution for on-demand data centres.


Brian Hayden explains the rationale behind the partnership and why it has been so beneficial to Dell. “In short they are a tried and trusted partner that I knew about at a component level and which our facilities team knew at a data centre level. What is particularly unique is their modular approach and the fact that they were pioneers in high density in-row cooling technology. Just as customers are interested


28 www.dcseurope.info I Summer 2014


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