Tele Atlas

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Tele Atlas creates digital maps and provides dynamic content for some of the world's leading navigation and location-based services. The company, which provides maps for more than 70 countries, gathers and collates information covering 27 million kilometres of motorway and 1.9 billion addresses. Its data centre stores more than 29 million ‘points of interest’ including public buildings, offices, and commercial locations.

The company is also an important supplier to the automotive and transport sectors and collaborates with these organisations in the early stages of product design so that navigation systems can be manufactured to the specific needs of the target audience.

Demand for richer navigation and location-based services are growing. So simply gathering and collating data from a network of satellites and mobile cameras is no longer sufficient. To be successful, companies like Tele Atlas have to refine data to a customer's specific needs, to provide online access, to show cities and landmarks in 3D, and to highlight points of interest along any route.

The Tele Atlas data centre plays a central role in delivering its services. The centre has grown significantly in recent times as the company added more processing power and storage to keep up with the demands of the market.

Until recently, a server was added every time new capacity was needed, leading to a heterogeneous environment of different classes and models of machines. The immediate effect was that administration became expensive. In addition, the data centre was consuming an increasing amount of energy, which went against the company's commitment to cutting its carbon footprint. The computers also took up a huge amount of floor space.

Reconciling these twin goals — supporting business growth while being more eco-friendly — led Tele Atlas to draw up a long-term strategy for the data centre that included standardising server hardware.

Chris De Backer is vice president of information technology for Tele Atlas and is responsible for its global data centres. He has extensive experience dealing with Sun and had no hesitation in choosing its server technology for this project. “The reason we chose the Sun Blade 8000 Modular System is that we can achieve the flexibility and scalability we strive for while at the same time reducing energy consumption.”

De Backer continues: “We had a legacy from the past of varied servers and models. Obviously, administration alone made this prohibitively expensive and led to a situation where we were not making optimal use of server capacity. This resulted in a slower, less accurate process and ultimately, an end product that did not meet our long-term strategy. Acquisition of the Sun Blade 8000 modular system completely reversed the situation.”

The Sun Blade 8000 modular system is suited to many applications. The Oracle Database can be run on these servers as well as Siebel and Java applications, an important step forward for Tele Atlas. Says De Backer: “With this blade server platform, we can choose Microsoft or Linux. That is the kind of flexibility I am looking for.”

It's no exaggeration to say that the company's new data centre strategy will ensure it can be at the forefront of digital mapping and navigational data services for years to come. This is a business where everything revolves around the processing, management and storage of complex computer intensive data. The company is searching for state-of-the-art technology that is reliable and flexible, that meets current and future demand.

De Backer is impressed by the Sun team's deep understanding of how its data centre technology aligns with the company's wider business goals. “Our data is our most important asset. We need a supplier who understands this and works with us to improve our processes. If there are problems, I need absolute confidence in a team who can solve them quickly.”

Sun technology is also helping Tele Atlas to reduce its carbon footprint. Thanks to the advanced cooling system of the Sun Blade 8000 technology the company has cut energy consumption significantly. Warm air is transformed into cool air within the server housing, and Tele Atlas further cools the space with third-party, in-row cooling units. This, in turn, frees up space in the data centre because there is no longer any need for traditional CRAC units.

De Backer says, “We want to anticipate growth while at the same time accommodating our partners’ every need. Within the limits of our budget we have found the best possible solution.”