There is a peaceful atmosphere at Ulvila in the vicinity of Pori, at the depth of the Finnish earth’s crust. Evenly cool temperature and humidity suitable for IT equipment create a dreamlike atmosphere complemented by roaring servers and storage devices in hundreds of meters of corridors.
This is one of Finland’s largest underground data centres, which level of security and reliability are top class also when rated on an international scale. The data centre owned by Ficolo Oy was built in a cave system that was originally excavated for use by the Finnish Defence Forces. And in some kind of defence use are these caves in the rough rock still – but now the object of defence are the information systems of Finnish companies.
”This was a million class investment for us”, says the Development Director Niko Candelin from Netox. “The growth in our customer numbers has been so high that we had to double our main service capacity while upgrading our aging hardware.”
The installation of the machine was the responsibility of Netox’s power duet Pekka Taskila and Tommi Laurila. Both of them are old Netox people, Taskila has even been involved since the establishment of the company. ”Three days were spent inside of the cliff, pushing equipment into the racks and making sure everything was playing”, smiles Tommi Laurila. ”A couple of IBM guys helped us.”
IBM’s Country Manager Pekko Päivärinta says that in the storage solutions delivered to Netox, it has especially been invested in fault tolerance. “In Ulvila, a high availability environment has been implemented. This means that Netox can now offer solutions to small and medium-sized enterprises that, until now, have only been available for large companies.”
”With the now installed devices, it is possible to provide the customers with private services, i.e. storage capacity that is also physically completely independent”, says Pekka Taskila. ”This is the best solution for Netox’s operation: to see how a company grows and develops while technology and customer relationships are moving forward.”
Also the Infrastructure Sales Leader Juha Jauhiainen from Pedab Finland finds reasons for pride in Ulvila’s investments. ”Netox is Pedab’s important partner and we have had pleasure to cooperate already for a long time. In this project, we are looking for Netox an extremely scalable and cost-effective environment that will enable Netox to grow continuously”, Jauhiainen said.
When the machine installation was complete, Taskila and Laurila climbed to the ground. If everything stays fine, and why it shouldn’t, you will not have to go back down right away. Device management is handled well from anywhere in the country, and the chemistry between the partners is clearly in good shape. The same applies to the Ulvila data centre.