Case Studies

A Customer Success
from the Experts in
Business-Critical Continuity™
The Situation
“Technology has transformed the way we
conduct business,” says Rick Oliver, Apollo Group
data center manger. “A decade ago we were largely
ground-based, but today a significant portion of our
business is online. That requires continuous access
to information technology. Our ability to provide
online education and services to our students
requiresrigorousqualitycontrols.Weservea
worldwide student body, and our faculty and
students need to access online classrooms,
course materials and services around the clock.”
Withitsincreasingdependenceontechnology,
the Apollo Group needed a new, 10,000-square-foot
production data center at its corporate headquarters
inPhoenix,Ariz.Whenfullypopulated,thefacility
would need to hold more than 1,000 servers. The
company’s commitment to technology, one of its
hallmarks, would drive the development of this new
data center.
“Weareoftenamongthefirstadoptersofany
innovation,”saysOliver.“Frombladeserversto
multi-terabytediskstoragetoWANtechnology,
we’re on the leading edge and that has helped
fuel the success of our business.”
New technology, however, carries a price in terms
of the power and cooling infrastructure needed to
support it.
“Fasterandsmallerusesmorepowerandputs
out more heat,” says Oliver. “Power fluctuations and
heat tend to destroy the very technology we depend
on, so we need power and cooling solutions that can
scale with tomorrow’s unpredictable power and
heat loads.”
Oliver knew that once the data center was
operational they would need to proactively manage
the data center environment to achieve “world-class”
performance. He also understood that to increase
data center efficiencies they would need to
integrate the monitoring and management
of the critical infrastructure.
The Solution
Oliver decided early in the planning process that
Emerson Network Power would provide the power
and cooling infrastructure. And after doing a deep
evaluation of available tools, he decided to use
ApertureVISTA.
“Wehaveahighlyqualifiedteamthatkeepsour
datacenterupandrunning,”saysOliver.“Wemake
sure to invest in solutions that make it easier to carry
out our mission. In this instance, that investment
included multiple active power and cooling
distribution paths, with redundant components
that are concurrently maintainable.”
The five-person Data Center Operations team worked
withFMSolutions,consultingengineers;Integrated
SupportSystems,alocalLiebertRepresentative;
and,DPAir,anITresellerand.LiebertNetwork
SolutionsPartner.TheteamspecifiedLiebertpower
and cooling equipment that met the high-availability
needs and could quickly adapt to increasing power
and heat loads.