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Nokia Software embarks on ‘carbon negative’ datacentre revamp push with HPE Greenlake
Global telecoms giant Nokia Software opens up about the work it is doing to improve the environmental friendliness of the R&D datacentres underpinning its 5G innovation
Nokia Software is drawing on its long-standing technology partnership with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) to decarbonise and upgrade its research and development-focused datacentres.
The datacentres, known as vLabs, are used by the telco’s software engineers for test and development purposes, as part of the firm’s broader role in the development of 5G technologies and use cases.
The company has recently begun upgrading these facilities through the deployment of HPE Greenlake technology, which is designed to provide enterprises with access to managed, public cloud-like IT resources housed within their own on-premise datacentres, on a pay-per-use basis.
According to Nokia Software, the deployment of HPE Greenlake within its vLab in Tampere, Finland, has enabled it to build a private cloud environment to support its R&D activities, while providing it with access to elastic infrastructure capabilities.
Jarkko Kytömäki, Nokia Software vLab infrastructure manager, said the aim of this work is to provide the firm’s software engineers with remotely accessible, shared R&D resources wherever they are in the world while providing a public cloud-like user experience that is managed on-premise.
“With HPE GreenLake, we are now able to bring hardware elasticity on-premise at a fraction of the cost of public cloud. If demand from our users increases, I am confident the HPE GreenLake consumption model can bring the additional resources we need to meet the business demand,” said Kytömäki.
The project also has a sustainability element to it, as Nokia Software is banking on this work to help bolster the environmental credentials of its datacentres by working with HPE to make its renewably-powered server farms operate in a carbon negative way.
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The deployment of HPE Greenlake will support this by paving the way for the firm to downsize its datacentre hardware estate, continued Kytömäki.
“Storage is a good example in which the same capacity that took up six datacentre racks in the past, now fits into less than one rack. That smaller footprint means less electricity, less cooling, and of course, less datacentre floor space,” he said.
Nokia Software CTO Ron Haberman added: “Nokia recognises its responsibility in the fight against climate change and our R&D vLab in Tampere, Finland is an important example of our commitment to taking actions against climate change.
“Thanks to our work with HPE Greenlake, this lab is not only carbon-neutral but it recovers the heat generated by our servers and IT systems for redistribution into the surrounding city,” he added.
