ACCIONA Builds Successful, Energy-Efficient Infrastructure with AMD Technology

When ACCIONA needed a system refresh, the reality of the company's work environment left it with tough choices. As one of Australia's premiere infrastructure manufacturing companies and a self-proclaimed leader in green construction, ACCIONA often works in difficult, remote environments, with limited access to wall power and patchy network connectivity. The company needed reliable, efficient systems with excellent management and security tools, high uptime, and long battery life.

What’s more, it needed a lot of them. ACCIONA describes themselves as the most sustainable global engineering firm with over €19 billion in revenue globally, 4500 employees in Australia and New Zealand, and a 7500-system laptop fleet. Any system provider vying for its attention needed to deliver enterprise-class service commitments, with a proven capability to scale from the cloud to the edge.

"We soon realized that there were a lot of advantages from using AMD over Intel, not only for PCs or laptops, but also within the server environment,” said Mark Roles, Major Projects ICT Manager at ACCIONA.

With such strong results from its fleet testing, ACCIONA felt comfortable evaluating AMD EPYC™ CPU-based servers, both locally and in the cloud, and they moved a lot of their cloud workloads in AWS to AMD.

I've worked with ACCIONA since I joined AMD several years ago. One of the unique hallmarks of the Australian market is the way we work directly with our customers to help achieve their sustainability goals. Field application engineers (FAEs) are essential to this purpose, and I’d like to take a moment to recognize AMD FAE Egor Pyrkov for his close collaboration with ACCIONA. His careful understanding of their needs helped AMD and HP deliver transformative performance improvements, with results now available in half the time – or less.

"Many of our projects now use drones," said Dan Cassar, Manager End User Services, ACCIONA. "A drone will fly over a rail track once a week and take thousands of images. Then Propeller software will stitch those images together. We were trying to do that with Intel-based CAD devices. They would sit for 8 to 12 hours, unusable, running at 100 percent and they cost A$6,000 per system. We've partnered with Allied in Australia to build high-end workstations powered by AMD CPUs, costing A$12,000 to 20,000, with a mixture of 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 and AMD Ryzen Threadripper CPUs with up to 128GB RAM. We're down to about four hours and the quality of the output is a lot more reliable."

Over the several years I’ve worked with ACCIONA, we initially deployed HP laptops powered by AMD Ryzen™ PRO processors before moving to cloud, server, and full-tower workstation deployments as ACCIONA’s needs evolved and the company became more comfortable with AMD and HP as complete solution providers. Now, AMD and ACCIONA have collaborated to produce a case study on how moving to HP laptops with AMD processors has advanced ACCIONA’s interests and improved its business outcomes. The YouTube video below summarizes the findings, for those who prefer to see the content that way:

In addition to providing a full range of server, workstation, and desktop processors, the AMD Ryzen™ AI PRO Series processors support a suite of manageability and security tools collectively known as AMD PRO Technologies. These capabilities are designed to make system support and maintenance fast, simple, and straightforward, ensuring our partners have software solutions that work for them in the field, all day long – even in challenging conditions.

"Having access to the AMD PRO platform and its enhanced security really fills us with a level of confidence that the product that we’re deploying out to the site and to our users has a focus around security. Not just security that we find in standard devices, an enhanced security platform that really sets AMD apart from its competitors," said Dan Cassar, Manager End User Services, ACCIONA.

Shifting to systems based on AMD hardware has paid dividends across the company. The case study reports HP laptops based on AMD Ryzen™ 7 7840HS CPUs delivered dramatic battery life improvements compared to competitor systems, contributing to a reduction of 360 metric tons of CO2 per year. Tests of AMD EPYC™ CPU hardware demonstrated how these processors could handle a thousand or more concurrent file share requests, significantly more than previous cloud instances. Workstation simulation run times improved by as much as 4x when moved to AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper CPUs, which changed how engineers approached work and what kinds of tests they had time to run.

As Cassar concludes: “Don’t think twice, try AMD.”

These types of efficiency improvements are critical to the company, and they’ve paid off; ACCIONA was recently recognized as the world’s most sustainable electrical utility according to the Dow Jones Sustainability Index.

It’s been a pleasure to work with Egor over the past few years to help ACCIONA achieve its green targets and engage with some of the fascinating construction and engineering projects being built across Australia. I hope you find the study useful.