CSC and IBM: Cutting Edge, Cutting Power Use

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Our IBM Alliance

Since the 1990s, CSC and IBM have worked together as global partners, offering solutions in all industries and the public sector. We’re a Premier Business Partner, the highest level in IBM’s PartnerWorld partner network. CSC’s early access to IBM’s technologies allows us to build them into CSC applications, bringing significant value to our mutual clients.

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For more information, visit: www.csc.com/CATRack or www.csc.com/FASTRack.

by Skip MacKenna

Energy conservation is one of the top Green priorities for corporations and businesses today. While some have achieved significant gains using a multitude of internal energy conservation practices, a greater challenge lies in the management of IT-related energy consumption.

The timing to address these issues couldn’t be better. The need for Green IT services and solutions is on the upswing and could be the number one issue facing IT executives at large companies. In addition, energy costs, while currently believed to account for around 10 percent of a firm’s IT budget, could rise to over 50 percent in a few years.

Social responsibility and public image are also driving businesses to reduce the power used to provide their IT services, while maintaining marketplace competitiveness. At CSC, energy conservation design principles are embedded in many of the business solutions we’ve recently launched.

“We are helping clients address their energy challenges by applying our long-term expertise in managing large-scale computing facilities, by leveraging our alliance relationships with leading hardware vendors and by investing in the latest technologies to manage energy consumption,” says Russ Owen, CSC group president of Managed Services. “Energy conservation is a top priority issue for CSC now and for our future generations.”

Creating Green solutions

For our engineering and manufacturing clients, we’re delivering feature-rich Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, which improve engineering productivity and lower energy costs. These solutions use energy efficient IBM BladeCenter servers in flexible configurations optimized for the distributed nature of PLM applications, the complexity of PLM data and the rapidly changing variations in end-user workloads.

Since the early 1990s, CSC has delivered a comprehensive portfolio of consulting and outsourcing solutions built around computer-aided design (CAD) and PLM for aircraft, automotive and shipbuilding customers.

Today, this work has evolved into two innovative turnkey PLM managed service offerings: CATRack™, developed by CSC and our alliance partners IBM and Dassault Systèmes, and FASTRack™, for Siemens PLM Software’s Teamcenter environment. CATRack and FASTRack increase engineering productivity, speed the time to market for new products and lower ongoing operating and maintenance costs.

Cutting energy costs

Some of the world’s largest manufacturing companies are using CATRack to realize these productivity and energy saving benefits. For example, at a major aerospace company, we replaced 13 existing conventional servers that consumed 13 megawatt hours per month with two fully redundant CATRacks that require only four megawatt hours per month, yet provide twice the capability of the servers they replaced.

“CSC designed CATRack and FASTRack with Green initiatives from the very start,” says Tim Seppi, IBM server sales executive, “starting with virtualizing many of the processes that customers have traditionally run on dedicated servers, and then implementing on the IBM BladeCenter with energy efficiencies above traditional servers.”

Other Green features of the CATRack and FASTRack solutions include:

• Better efficiency than rack servers — for like configurations, IBM BladeCenter can save up to 35 percent on power over 1U servers

• Solid state hard drives — use up to 87 percent less power and heat than mechanical hard drives

• Integrated 10Gb Ethernet switch — which can be more than 95 percent energy efficient than external switch offerings

• Innovative calibrated vectored cooling — optimizes air intake, fan placement and zone cooling technologies to maximize the air flow inside the server for optimal cooling efficiency.

Improving project lifecycle management

In addition to saving energy, CATRack and FASTRack deliver significant business benefits. They enable accurate, timely and secure data currency for firms collaborating on complex engineering and manufacturing projects. The BladeCenter architecture used on the systems allows for quick and affordable scalability to match the actual capacity needed by design organizations. And CSC’s “fully managed” service delivery model provides end users with a single point of accountability, which improves communications and speeds issue resolution.

“The CATRack and FASTRack solutions create significant value for our global Manufacturing clients,” says Eileen Sweeney, CSC’s global president of Manufacturing. “In today’s difficult business climate, our clients are seeking new ways to grow, collaborate more effectively on a global scale, wisely invest their capital in strategic imperatives and meet corporate sustainability objectives. By working together with our alliance partners, CSC enables our clients to accomplish these goals with innovative PLM solutions. We are excited to bring these solutions to market.”