MENTOR GRAPHICS

Mentor Graphics is an electronic design automation company, providing software and hardware design solutions with more than 4,500 employees in 70 locations worldwide. PLANNET was retained by Mentor Graphics to develop a strategy to consolidate more than 30 engineering data centers in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific.

PLANNET evaluated real estate, facilities, network, IT architecture and operations to develop a detailed Statement of Requirements (SOR), which included IT capacity, optimal IT architecture, network requirements, reliability and services level requirements for the data center as well as a total cost of ownership for the proposed data center solution. The project compared risks and benefits of viable approaches including greenfield, brownfield, wholesale lease and colocation.

The analysis revealed that a geo-regional consolidation strategy was the most efficient and cost-effective. As a result of PLANNET’s recommendations, two data centers were built; one on the company’s corporate headquarters campus in Wilsonville, Oregon to serve North America, and one at the company’s Shannon, Ireland location to support European and North African operations.

Subsequently, PLANNET was retained to provide program management, preparing the engineering basis of design for the two locations, and selection of design engineering teams for the deployment of the two sites.

OpEx cost savings technologies were utilized specific to each geographic/climatic region, including the use of ambient air exchange in both locations to allow the data centers to operate 90% of the time or more without mechanical cooling. For warm days in the Wilsonville data center, indirect evaporative cooling was applied as the backup system. The data center in Ireland uses conventional DX backup cooling.

The consolidation efforts resulted in significant cost-savings by lowering IT and facilities operational expenditures.