CASE STUDY ENERGY

Vestas harnesses the power of the wind

with big data analytics supported by
Lenovo NeXtScale

Overview
To help customers get the most out of
their investment in wind turbines,
renewable energy giant Vestas
deployed a Lenovo NeXtScale System
M5 cluster to support game-changing
big data analytics. Today, the
company can analyze streaming data
from over 35,000 turbines around the
world – delivering actionable insight to
improve manufacturing, assembly,
maintenance and customer services.

Over the past 35 years, Vestas has continuously pioneered new technologies and
solutions that have brought reliable wind energy solutions to 37 markets, thus
“With the Lenovo
planting the seeds of the modern wind industry. Wind power from Vestas’ more than cluster, we can run
59,000 wind turbines currently reduces carbon emissions by over 60 million tons of
carbon dioxide every year. Headquartered in Aarhus, Denmark, the company
the compute-
provides jobs for around 21,800 people at service and project sites, research intensive streaming
facilities, factories, and offices all over the world.
data analyses and
Lars Christian Christensen, Vice President of Vestas, begins: “Vestas is the global
leader in wind energy. But we don’t just manufacture industry-leading wind turbines,
simulations we
we also deliver comprehensive management and maintenance services to help need to ensure
customers realize the full potential of their wind business.”
customers benefit
Taking advantage of big data from our expertise.”
Vestas recognized long ago that the key to helping customers extract the greatest
—Lars Christian Christensen,
value from their wind farms was data.
Vice President,
Vestas
Lars Christian Christensen elaborates: “We’ve been gathering data from operational
wind turbines located all around the world since 1991. Today, there are over
 CASE STUDY
ENERGY

33,500 turbines connected to the Vestas grid, all of which stream huge volumes of
operational data into our data lakes in real time, 24/7.” Solution components
Hardware
As a result, Vestas has vast data libraries at its disposal that, when combined with Lenovo NeXtScale M5 with 662
data from global weather systems, form the basis of the company’s Smart Data & compute nodes with over 17,000
Consultancy Services. cores powered by Intel® Xeon® E5
family of processors
Anders Rhod Gregersen, Chief Specialist at Vestas, explains: “By running in-depth Lenovo Intelligent Cluster
analyses, we can transform this data into actionable insight to support customer Lenovo System x3850 X6
operations and win new business. For example, we can pinpoint the optimal location Lenovo RackSwitch G8052
for a turbine to ensure customers get the best energy output, increasing their Lenovo RackSwitch G8272
revenues. We can therefore provide potential customers with business case certainty. Mellanox SX 6025 switch
We also use data models and simulations to ensure that we deliver best-in-class
maintenance services.” Software
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
With vast quantities of turbine data streaming in around the clock, demand for CentOS
high-performance computing (HPC) resources was growing – fast. To continue xCAT
delivering its Smart Data & Consultancy Services, Vestas recognized the need to IBM Streams
refresh its underlying IT infrastructure. Open Grid Scheduler

Selecting a powerful platform Services

After evaluating HPC offerings from a range of vendors, Vestas decided to implement Lenovo factory integration services
Lenovo NeXtScale System to support its Smart Data & Consultancy Services. and HPC deployment services

Anders Rhod Gregersen comments: “Lenovo is one of the few hardware vendors on
the market with a dedicated HPC group. We really appreciate the deep expertise that
the Lenovo team offers – having people on board who have hands-on experience of
designing, delivering and supporting HPC solutions is a big plus.”

Lars Christian Christensen adds: “For budgetary reasons, we had a very tight
deadline for getting the solution on site and the Lenovo team bent over backwards to
get everything done in time. Despite our signing the contract just before Christmas,
Lenovo was able to deliver the solution before the end of the year. We’ve developed
a great relationship with the local team, who consistently deliver excellent
support services.”

Working closely with Lenovo, Vestas deployed a cluster based on 662 Lenovo
NeXtScale nx360 M5 compute nodes – the largest HPC cluster in Denmark.
Powered by CPUs from the Intel® Xeon® E5 family of processors, the Lenovo system
offers the high levels of performance needed to run resource-intensive data analysis,
modeling and simulation tasks. The cluster runs the IBM Streams analytics platform
to process and analyze data from 33,500 turbines in near real time, and uses
Open Grid Scheduler to manage jobs and benchmarks at 772 TFLOPS.

Generating actionable insight

Today, the Lenovo solution ensures that Vestas can take full advantage of the huge
volumes of data constantly streaming into its libraries from turbines across the globe.
 CASE STUDY
ENERGY

Anders Rhod Gregersen notes: “Supported by the powerful Lenovo cluster, we can
perform detailed analyses of existing turbines and climate conditions to find the best
“Supported by the
possible location for new wind farm sites. We use this information to create a powerful Lenovo
rock-solid business case, whereby we can confidently report to potential customers
how much electricity their proposed site will produce – giving them peace of mind
cluster, we can
that they’ll get a healthy return on their investment. perform detailed
“Only Vestas Smart Data & Consultancy Services can deliver this level of insight so analyses of existing
quickly – competitors have to run investigations that take at least 18 months and
cost potential customers thousands of Euros. Harnessing years’ worth of big data
turbines and
puts us well ahead of the competition.” climate conditions
As well as winning Vestas new business, the Smart Data & Consultancy Services are to find the best
used to support turbine manufacture, assembly and maintenance. possible location
“Deep data-driven insight into existing turbine operations enable us to continually for new wind farm
optimize manufacturing and assembly processes to ensure that we always deliver
high-quality equipment,” says Lars Christian Christensen. “By analyzing streaming
sites.”
data, we can also spot issues before they start affecting energy production. —Anders Rhod Gregersen,
Chief Specialist,
Vestas
“Thanks to streaming data analysis, we know very quickly if a turbine is facing the
wrong direction or malfunctioning – rather than finding out about it days after the
fact. This means that we can notify the customer, send repairmen or spare parts out
immediately, and fix the problem before it affects energy production.”

Anders Rhod Gregersen concludes: “With so much data at our disposal, we know
everything about our turbines. With the Lenovo cluster, we can run the compute-
intensive streaming data analyses and simulations we need to ensure customers
benefit from our expertise. We’ve been so impressed with the performance of the
Lenovo NeXtScale System solution that we’re already planning an upgrade to meet
ever-increasing demand for our Smart Data & Consultancy Services.”

For more information

To learn more about Lenovo Data Center Systems solutions, contact your Lenovo
Sales Representative or Lenovo Business Partner, or visit:
www.lenovo.com/data-center

For more information about Vestas, visit: www.vestas.com or connect with @Vestas
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