Aircel’s transformation as a major pan-India telecom player
involved consolidating Aircel’s five separate data centers
into a single data center to control operations all over
Aircel’s network. Aircel was facing problems in providing
interoperability amongst its different circles since there was no
single normalized policy.
Accordingly, Aircel initiated a Green IT initiative with the
objective of creating a world-class Tier-III compliant green data
center, green service management and operations, green server and
storage resource management techniques, and green collaboration
techniques. Aircel partnered with Wipro to set up a green-field
data center of 50,000 sq. ft. in Gurgaon which met Tier-III
standards as per The Uptime Institute, and was LEED-certified.
Understanding that on an average, 63 percent of a data
centre’s energy consumption is for cooling, Wipro designed an
energy-efficient data center using green principles. Some of the
technologies implemented for the green data center: Adaptive
Cooling Technology, Geo-thermal exchange, Earth Air tunnel (EAT),
lighting solutions and solar thermal solutions.
Today, a centralized data center has helped to provide complete
interoperability between different circles. Aircel has been able to
reduce the overall carbon footprint of the data center by over 400
tonnes per year. The data center has also helped in establishing
service oriented architecture (SOA) that, in turn, has enabled fast
rollouts pan-India without compromising on the flexibility to adapt
to business requirements. For instance, in record 59 days, eight
circles were rolled out. Considering the pace at which the telecom
industry is growing, Aircel forsees the need to build three more
data centers of similar or higher capacity.
Note: Aircel is an EDGE winner. The complete list of
EDGE winners is published in the October 2010 Print issue of
InformationWeek India
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