Swedish Båstad Municipality Implements Compact Data Centre Solution From Proact

Proact IT Group AB has been selected by Båstad Municipality in Sweden to deliver and deploy its new IT infrastructure.

The core of the municipality’s data centre will be replaced by a solution with minimal space requirements. This will conserve energy, enhance reliability and facilitate support and daily IT operations.

When upgrading its data centre, Båstad Municipality will install a new hardware solution – OmniCube by SimpliVity Inc., to be delivered and deployed by Proact over the coming weeks. The OmniCube saves space as well as energy. The present server platform used by Båstad is housed in a refrigerator-sized cabinet with multiple hardware products, while the OmniCube solution is contained in a single unit, four inches high.

“We are currently addressing two trends which move in opposite directions: The demand for processing power and storage continues to rise rapidly, while the hardware becomes ever more compact and integrated,” says Dan Mårtensson, regional manager, Proact. “The net result is still that we can deliver more capable solutions in less space. Båstad’s choice attests to a breakthrough for the new generation of hyper-converged hardware, and it is clear that all leading vendors have joined in this movement.“

By switching to its new data centre equipment, Båstad will replace a number of physical servers, storage and networking units with an integrated system where all components are tuned and tested. The single OmniCube unit will run some 80 different applications that serve about 1,000 users within the municipality.

“We will reduce the energy requirements, both for powering the data centre and for cooling. We also get better performance, together with enhanced reliability and fault tolerance by duplicating all critical data centre functions,” says Robert Zackrisson, IT operations manager, Båstad Municipality.

For added fault tolerance, the municipality will deploy two identical OmniCube units which serve as backups to each other. At the municipality office, a new data centre has been built in a room of 16 square meters. The second unit will be located in another building across the street.

OmniCube data centre products are based on hyper-convergence. Using this novel ‘all-in-one’ concept, multiple data centre functions which traditionally require separate hardware, are merged into a single unit, including servers, storage, backup and networking.