EEC Expansion Approved

The EEC has been a great facility for our customers and partners to work and collaborate with our product groups in since it's opening in April 2003, but after five wonderful years it's time to do some remodeling to make it even better for the next 5 years and beyond. This expansion has been approved and we are well on our way to starting this with completion in Q2 CY09. We will be blogging throughout the process letting you know how it's going, show some pictures and share funny stories about it. 

This new expansion will include the following and much more:

·         Double the data center capacity to accommodate growing demand from our partners to showcase their latest products and technologies, facilitate our growing charter, allow for even greater scale up / scale out scenario testing.

·         Enhance data center instrumentation to help support green data center testing initiatives.

·         Addition of storage specific data center which will contain all of the EEC’s enterprise storage assets, helping us to meet rapidly growing customer and partner demand for larger arrays.

·         Create two new technology focused data centers

o    Virtualization – this new Solution Lab will be a showcase facility for Microsoft and our partners, dedicated full time to virtualization and related technologies

o    Unified Communications – A new technology showcase with a fully functioning, end-to-end Unified Communications installation.  This will allow our customers and partners to do more extensive, real-world testing on UC as well as broaden other testing to include UC for a deeper exposure of how this new initiative can work in their environments.

·         Expand existing High Performance Computing (HPC) test cluster

o    The EEC, together with Hewlett Packard and Intel, is adding a second HPC cluster to meet growing demand.  This 80-node, 640-core cluster will be moved into dedicated space in the expanded data center for both onsite and remote customer use.

·         New conference and training center

o    The EEC is doubling the size of the Conference Center enabling new events such as training, seminars, and joint or partner led activities.

Kevin Engman

Product Manager – Enterprise Engineering Center