Beyond data center space, power, cooling and security, European data center operator e-shelter offers new ways for its colocation customers to drive innovation and interact with co-tenants to create new and enhanced technologies. With the recent opening of e-shelter’s new data center campus in the Amsterdam area in the Netherlands, e-shelter also brings its Innovation Lab to this new data center environment. Here’s what colocation tenants may expect.
Launched in 2017, e-shelter’s innovation lab initially started with 30 participating tech companies, but this base has now grown to 115 partners and start-ups. Let’s take a look into the Innovation Lab use cases and the technology results being achieved – by highlighting three of these Innovation Lab use cases.
1. INNOVATION LAB USE CASE
Extend Fujitsu Cloud Services with Dedicated Enterprise Storage
e-shelter Colocation Partners
- Fujitsu
- NetApp
Project Description
Once fully in control of the storage environment, one can meet the strictest possible data compliance and sovereignty requirements because you know where your data lives at all times. You’re then able to achieve compliance standards in even the strictest industries.
In this Innovation Lab use case, governance, data privacy, and data sovereignty had to be aligned. Because data stored in binary or digital form is subject to the conditions of the country in which the data resides. Moreover, it is important to understand the rules, legislation, and regulations that apply to various countries as they apply to personal information, data privacy, and data protection.
Technologies Involved
- Fujitsu Cloud Service
- NetApp Private Storage
Innovation Results Achieved
- Fujitsu Cloud can be enhanced for workloads that have strict data sovereignty and compliance requirements
- Governance, data privacy, and data sovereignty can be aligned
- With NetApp Private Storage (NPS) from Fujitsu, your NetApp storage is kept in a Fujitsu Global Data Center, directly connected and close to Fujitsu Cloud Services and can also be extended to the Cloud from Azure and AWS
- When you put your data in a Fujitsu Global Data Center rather than in the Fujitsu cloud, your computing resources would feel local while your data remains secured and protected
2. INNOVATION LAB USE CASE
Software-Defined Networking for High-Performance OpenStack Clouds
e-shelter Colocation Partners
- CPLANE NETWORKS
- Canonical
- Dell EMC
Project Description
Private and hybrid clouds are being rapidly deployed to improve IT agility, optimize infrastructure utilization and lower total cost of ownership. Deploying OpenStack based clouds at scale would require a high performance network infrastructure that supports virtual workloads and tightly integrates with the external physical network – a challenge for Innovation Lab participants.
CPLANE DVNd SDN product is a standard OpenStack plugin providing comprehensive management of data center networks, implementing virtual network overlays and supporting virtual and physical network functions and appliances.
Technologies Involved
- Dynamic Virtual Networks Datacenter
- VXLAN Virtual Overlay
- Open vSwitch
- CPLANE OGR
- DHCP, Floating IP, NAT, DDoS Protection, ARP Proxy
- MPLS
- BGP
Innovation Results Achieved
- Delivers high-performance OpenStack networking with full automation
- Enables OpenStack to scale to thousands of compute nodes
- Supports complex network topologies and services
- Extends and integrates the OpenStack network with the rest of the data center
- Provides network connectivity between multiple OpenStack instances across LAN and WAN networks
3.INNOVATION LAB USE CASE
Lenovo Red Hat OpenStack Hybrid Cloud Solutions
e-shelter Colocation Partners
- Lenovo
- Red Hat
Project Description
Many enterprises are moving to cloud-enabled workloads. IT organizations may create an agile and cost-effective cloud infrastructure for traditional workloads, while at the same time, creating massively scalable public cloud-like infrastructures for cloud-enabled applications. Lenovo servers and Red Hat OpenStack Platform provide solutions that help companies build hybrid infrastructures for the right IT workloads.
Organizations want responsive and manageable IT infrastructures that can help them improve productivity, reduce complexity, and support the increasing demands that are placed on the business.
Enterprise applications are deployed across multiple virtual machines (VMs) and even across data centers. OpenStack is intended for cloud-enabled workloads that require applications to be architected to use computing, storage, and network resources in concert. It provides infrastructure and management capabilities for system-wide resources. In this Innovation Lab use case Lenovo and Red Hat aimed at aligning their technologies while enhancing their combined capabilities.
Technologies Involved
- Lenovo ThinkSystem Servers
- Lenovo Networking Switches
- Lenovo XClarity Management
- Red Hat OpenStack Platform
- Red Hat Ceph
- Red Hat CloudForms
Innovation Results Achieved
- Consolidated and fully integrated hardware resources with balanced workloads for compute, network, and storage
- An aggregation of computing and storage hardware, which would deliver a single, virtualized resource pool customizable to different computing and storage ratios to meet the requirements of various solutions
- Ease of scaling (vertical and horizontal) based on business requirements. Computing and storage resources can be extended at runtime
- Elimination of single points of failure in every layer by delivering continuous access to virtual machines (VMs)
- Rapid OpenStack cloud deployment, including updates, patches, security, and usability enhancements, with “enterprise-level” support from Red Hat and Lenovo
About e-shelter
e-shelter is one of the leading data center operators in Europe providing highly secure environments for housing and connectivity of IT and network systems. With a presence in the key city-markets in Europe, e-shelter leverages more than 400 MVA of power capacity to deliver scalable data center solutions. As a subsidiary of NTT Communications, e-shelter is part of a global network of data centers covering 20+ countries and over 400,000 sqm of data center space. Among e-shelter’s clients are financial services companies, telecom operators, public sector, IT service and outsourcing providers as well as cloud service providers.
In addition to e-shelter, the companies Arkadin, Dimension Data, itelligence, NTT Communications, NTT DATA and NTT Security are part of the NTT Group. You can find further information on the global NTT Group at www.ntt-global.com.
To learn more about the e-shelter innovation lab, visit: https://www.e-shelter.de/en/e-shelter-innovation-lab.
