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| Bridgestone modernizes data center, hauls out 13 tons of copper wire |
It was likewise the year tire-making giant Bridgestone Corp. opened an information center in Akron, Ohio. If walls might talk, this data center could tell the story of IT.That center opened on Oct. 9, 1968, with racks and racks of tapes and a water-cooled mainframe.
Today, it is the house of systems supporting an almost entirely virtualized environment.Bridgestone recently ended upcombining 6 information centers, amounting to about 25,000 square feet, into one 10,000-square-foot center. The project began in 2015 and cost $17.3 million.The renovated data center officially opened in April and its completion was as crucial to the neighborhood as it was to the company. The mayor of Akron was at the ribbon cutting.
The center employs about 80 IT workers.Bridgestone had run a” relatively decentralized”environment, in regards to management, procedures and systems, stated Rob Olds, Bridgestone’s acting CIO. The company wanted the same standards, processes and governance throughout the business, and a data center that “is a point of stability and confidence but likewise an enabler of the organisation, “he stated.
[To talk about this story, visit Computerworld’s Facebook page.] But under the raised flooring was history.There were water-cooling lines dating from the late 1960s and evidence of successive waves of technological change, mostly in the form of copper wiring.
Physical servers were moved in and out of the data center over the decades, but the older, connecting tech under the flooring wasn’t all gotten rid of. Bridgestone The Bridgestone information center in 1968, with racks and racks of tapes.”It was layers and layers of wiring as you would expect,” stated Mike Hartz, senior supervisor, IT Special Projects, who managed the renovation.The job went from wall to wall and included hauling out 26,000 pounds of copper wiring.The information center now has 67 miles of fiber-optic cabling.
The near 50-year history of the location offers a criteria for determining modification. In 1968, the information center had 8,500 miles of tape saving 1,986 gigabytes of data, or about 2 terabytes, a quantity of information that can fit on a 2TB thumb drive. Today, the data center holds about 3.5 petabytes of information, stated Bridgestone officials, or about 3.5 million GB.The shrinking of the information center is because of enhancements in technology. Information center area in basic is decreasing at enterprises due to technology developments and use of the cloud.About 90 percent of the works in Bridgestone’s information center are virtualized, Olds stated.
The center has 3,000 physical and virtual servers.Olds said there will be a continuous requirement for on-premise data.”To me it’s a balancing act, “he said, and he does not see any design that is all-cloud or on-premise. The cloud is a complementary service, he said.Bridgestone likewise built an information center to tier 3 standards, which suggests having redundant power feed, generators, power distribution, cooling system and network. The Uptime Institute, an independent advisory group, established a Tier Category System and accredits data centers on one to four levels.
Bridgestone didn’t seek official certification, since “we weren’t offering our services, it didn’t make sense to invest that money,”Hartz said.The remodelling enabled Bridgestone to move to an eco-friendly cooling system. The information center uses outside air cooling for 70 percent of the year. Mechanical cooling is only required once the temperature reaches 70 degrees.
In the Mother of all Demos, Engelbart showed the mouse, videoconferencing, copy and paste, windowing and lots of other technologies. It’s difficult to envision what this information center will look like in 2068.
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