Opera Software (OSE: OPERA), developer of cross-platform Web browser technology, has selected Dell to simplify its data center to deliver a faster, more stable and flexible Internet experience to its customers around the world.
Opera prides itself on delivering its customers the optimum Internet experience on any device, and relies heavily on its IT systems to deliver top performance and reliability. As its user base grows and Opera allows its customers to tailor their Opera solution for more customized content, the company delivers billions of transcoded webpages every month to millions of users. For example, Opera Mini, the world’s most popular mobile Web browser, boasts a user base of 58 million monthly unique users, distributed across all geographies. As a result, the company needed to unify its data center technologies and deploy an efficient storage solution to better manage this explosion in data. With data centers located in Oslo, San Francisco and Warsaw, as well as smaller IT sites around the world, Opera also needed a unified network and architecture to better manage its distributed IT environment.
In addition, as part of Opera’s pledge to limit the environmental burden on earth, air, water and ecosystem, Opera recently announced a major, new data center located in Iceland. The Thor Data Center is powered only by local and environmentally friendly sources, such as geothermal or hydropower. As conserving energy is part of Opera’s strategy to a more environmental approach to running its IT infrastructure, the company needed to make sure that the hardware it deploys in its data centers around the world is energy-efficient.
To meet its business objectives, Opera deployed more than 700 Dell™ PowerEdge™ blade servers, 43 Dell™ PowerEdge™ blade enclosures and five Dell EqualLogic PS Series storage arrays, which has cut Opera’s power consumption by 35 percent and increased performance by 33 percent. This open, standards-based solution also includes a comprehensive set of services, with ProSupport and Custom Factory Integration (CFI) services on every server.
Specifically, Opera turned to Dell for a bespoke solution consisting of Dell M1000e blade enclosures and Dell PowerEdge M610 blade servers with low voltage processors to deliver exceptional performance per watt while supporting all major products, services and features like Opera Mini, Opera Turbo, Opera Link, Opera Widgets and Opera Unite. The M1000e enclosure takes advantage of thermal design efficiencies, such as ultra-efficient power supplies, dynamic power efficient fans and optimised airflow design that can efficiently cool the chassis to enable outstanding performance with lower power consumption. The M610 will enable Opera to complete multiple tasks simultaneously, while boosting performance as business usage demands it most. As Opera’s application needs increase, the M610 will allow the company to scale up in performance and memory to meet future business demands.
Dell also simplifies server deployment for Opera by delivering hardware locally to each of Opera’s IT sites around the world. Opera’s previous IT supplier could only send hardware to the Oslo headquarters, at which point it was Opera’s responsibility to distribute the units to its data centers, which was costly and time-consuming.
Opera’s server infrastructure is supported by the Dell EqualLogic PS6000 Series of iSCSI storage arrays, on which Opera has standardized its entire storage infrastructure due to the arrays’ exceptional performance, ease-of-setup and management. Opera can now manage its entire global storage estate from Oslo, saving the company significant management time, as previously IT staff relied on local storage at each site. In addition, the scalability and breadth of the Dell EqualLogic portfolio will allow Opera to future-proof its IT environment through a single solution provider.
