Performance marketing specialist Criteo has chosen Huawei to supply 700 servers for its new Hadoop Cluster data centre in Pantin, Seine St Denis, near Paris.

Huawei won the tender after its FusionServer RH2288H V3 impressed in a strict comparative study, it says. The servers were chosen for their abundance of high-capacity disks, which give the Criteo data centre a better storage density and cut energy consumption by 10 per cent, it claims.

The new Hadoop platform of Huawei servers will boost Criteo’s processing performance by 30 per cent, it’s claimed. In the first stage of the project, the 700 machines in the Paris data centre outperformed Criteo’s Amsterdam data centre, in terms of computing power and storage, even though the Dutch site has 1,200 servers at its disposal, according to Criteo’s Senior Engineering Manager for Infrastructure Operations, Matthieu Blumberg.

“This is the biggest private Hadoop platform in Europe as of today,” said Blumberg, “Huawei has undeniably good ICT solutions and extensive knowledge of Big Data. We were really impressed.”

As a result, Criteo now plans to install up to 5,000 servers, taking up 350 square meters of rack space, at its Pantin data centre. The total power consumption will rise to 2 MW as the power of the Huawei server estate grows, according to Blumberg.

“We are proud to have built this partnership with Criteo: this is the kind of project we love to develop,” said Robert Yang, Head of the Huawei France Enterprise Business Group.