Efficient Backup and Disaster Recovery for ACTIRIS in Belgium

ACTIRIS is the employment agency in the Brussels region providing a wide range of services for job seekers including job offers, Curriculum Vitae management, and work experience. ACTIRIS wanted to replace its existing Disaster Recovery and Backup system, with a more reliable, efficient and easy to manage system. Bull implemented a backup solution based on StoreWay Calypso, powered by CommVault, and supporting existing backup data. The customer benefits from an easy to administer solution, requiring less administrative resources. The Calypso architecture with its Unified Data Management attributes meets specific needs such as Disaster Recovery management based on data backups, and offers numerous options for improved integration within the customer's virtual server environment (VMware & Microsoft Virtual Server). ACTIRIS appreciated Bull expertise and the quality of the partnership.

AFD reaches all four corners of the world with Bull

The French Overseas Development Agency, the AFD, is a public body charged with implementing the government’s external aid and development policy, internationally and in the French overseas territories. The AFD operates in four continents, financing and supporting projects at a local level that are designed to help improve people’s living conditions, stimulate economic development and protect the environment. In 2008, the AFD distributed some 3.5 billion, helping in particularly to provide clean drinking water to 4.4 million people and education to some seven million children. With Bull's help, the deployed a new, centralized, and more homegeneous IT infrastructure and messaging system in more than 50 countries across four continents.

Protecting the strategic data in France’s budgetary system

Led by AIFE (l’Agence pour l’informatique financière de l’État), the French State financial IT Agency, the ‘Chorus’ project is aiming to provide a single, common budgetary system for the State, based on SAP. Eventually, the boundaries of Chorus will extend to the replacement of 40 applications, at 15 ministries, across 3,000 locations. It will be used by 35,000 staff involved in financial functions at centralized and decentralized State departments (managers financial controllers, accountants...). With such a sensitive application, the security and performance challenges are immense, and all the more acute given the unprecedented scale of the project. Bull and EMC have been chosen to help meet this challenge. Bull has been chosen by AIFE to design, supply and implement the Chorus ultra high-availability infrastructure.

ATEME and Bull partner for extreme performance in transcoding

The combined expertise enables large scale transcoding of video content for multiple screens ATEME, a world leader in video compression solutions for the broadcast and broadband market, and Bull announced a broadening of their cooperation to market ATEME video processing solutions on bullx blade systems. Introduced by ATEME in 2009, TITAN is a scalable video processing platform, based on bullx blades, that enables massively parallel content transcoding into multiple at a very high degree of fidelity to the original source. It is increasingly popular with content providers and already deployed to deliver linear channels, Video On Demand or Catch Up TV services to the TV sets, PCs, tablets and smartphones of more than 70 million subscribers worldwide.

Bull helps AWE scientists push back the boundaries of science

To carry out their important work in support of the UK’s nuclear deterrent scientists at AWE need a vast amount of computing power. Until earlier this year, the organisation was reliant on one main supercomputer. However, this year, after a two year competitive tender process, AWE has accepted delivery of three supercomputers from Bull. All three are based on the award winning bullx platform. The first two, named ‘Willow’, were installed separately, one after the other, in the early part of the year before the most powerful of the three, named ‘Blackthorn’, was installed later in the year.

In Brazil, Banco do Brasil chooses Bull to supply multi-document processing solution

In December 2010, Bull Latin America signed a contract with Banco do Brasil (the State-controlled Brazilian bank and the biggest bank in Brazil) to supply products and services for a turnkey financial and non-financial document processing solution, using distributed document image capture, automatic image identification and classification, automatic data extraction using OCR[1] and ICR[2] technologies, signature verification, document formatting, data extraction and legacy systems integration for business transactions. This is a classic, although highly complex, example of a paperless system. The project involves the deployment of both the main and back-up document processing centers within the bank’s data centers, with distributed document capture units all over the country (in 5,000 branches) connected via networks.

BSC-CNS triples its calculation capacity

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) now has a new cluster with graphical accelerators which will be used to consolidate its research in programming models, tool development and application porting. This new Bull system, based on bullx nodes, each equipped with Intel processors and NVIDIA GPUs, would be ranked 90 in the world in the June 2011 Top500 list with its peak performance of 186 Teraflops. This cluster doubles MareNostrum's calculation capacity, consumes seven times less power and occupies 13 times less space. The combination of this new machine and the current MareNostrum system means that the public consortium has tripled the supercomputing resources provided to the Spanish scientific community.

Barclays France retains the SSO Evidian solution

Barclays France’s ever-growing staff was finding it difficult to implement its rigorous security rules. Applications were increasing in number, with very diverse technologies. Cases of forgotten passwords and incorrect password attempts were frequent since there were as many passwords as applications. The helpdesk was, therefore, overburdened, resulting in a very high cost in terms of assistance and loss of productivity. At the same time, a strict security policy was reinforced: for instance, complex passwords were to be renewed every month, and workstations locked after 3 incorrect password attempts. After a call for tender to three security-solution providers, Barclays France chose Evidian’s Enterprise SSO.Their solution was the only one that enabled us to deploy SSO and biometrics from only one screen, which simplifies management.Moreover, Evidian provides an effective backup tool in case of biometric system failure.

BBVA relies on a new Bull supercomputer

BBVA's bullx supercomputer will be the fifth most powerful in Spain, and is said to be the country's leading system in the banking sector BBVA will reduce the time taken to run models of complex trend scenarios and financial forecasts by up to three times

BinckBank, the leading internet stock brokerage company in The Netherlands

BinckBank, the leading internet stock brokerage company in The Netherlands, relies on Bull to redesign and manage its complete IT infrastructure When BinckBank merged with Alex Beleggersbank, it was faced with having to consolidate two different IT infrastructures. In their search for a IT supplier, they looked to find a partner rather than a vendor who would be a reflection of their own corporate ethos: flexible, independent, reliable and efficient. Bull had proven in the past that they were exactly such a partner and was asked to help in the design, implementation and management of the new IT infrastructure. Today, BinckBank sports one of the most innovative private cloud IT infrastructures in the Netherlands.

Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council goes digital with Bull

BMBC is one of the lead local authorities in ‘Digital Region’ South Yorkshire to have deployed the first universally accessible superfast broadband network in the UK. With the help of Bull, BMBC positions itself as one of the leading local authorities to embrace the drive to provide increased public access to digital information. It has achieved this through the recent launch of a number of digital initiatives including Totally Online Barnsley, the Barnsley launch of Digital Region and the opening of the Bull TCL Data Centre.These initiatives have received endorsement from digital inclusion champion, Martha Lane Fox, who launched the Race Online 2012 Programme. Martha Lane Fox commented:“Barnsley is a fantastic example of how communities can benefit from being online and has clearly demonstrated that through innovation, forward thinking and engaging in good public-private partnerships, the goals of digital inclusion can be achieved".

C1000 ups its data availability with new storage infrastructure supplied by Bull

C1000, one of the largest purchasing cooperatives in The Netherlands for the FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) industry, supplies its franchisees with extensive support on payroll, IT, Marketing and purchasing services. In this highly competitive market, innovation and process efficiency are key factors that require a close coordination between the business processes and IT to ensure the fastest possible time to market. Storage plays a critical role in this process as data needs to be manipulated, queried, backed-up, restored, moved and monitored. Based on a series of workshops with various suppliers, C1000 chose Bull to design and implement the storage solution based on price, service and project definition and implementation.

CARMAT and Bull announce the development of a portable equipment for the recipients of CARMAT’s arti

CARMAT, the designer and developer of the world’s most advanced total artificial heart, and Bull – via its subsidiary Amesys, a leader in mission-critical system architecture – today announced their agreement regarding the supply of a power system. Under the terms of this agreement, Amesys will develop a portable system that will enable patients to move around independently and safely in their daily activities. The user-friendly equipment will allow the patient to live at home and to travel around. This system will be available by early 2012 in order to be available for the home discharge of the early, clinical phase recipients of the CARMAT artificial heart.

Bull supports every area of Carrefour’s business!

Europe’s number one retailer and the second largest in the world, with 15,661 stores, the Carrefour Group is constantly adapting its organization to ensure that it meets its strategic objectives. At the very heart of its business, IT support has become a key resource, guaranteeing the Group’s operational excellence. The smooth operation of checkouts and warehouses depends on the quality of this support, as well as on the effective management of the 400 or more applications that are currently in use. As well as these tools, service levels have been defined to align with quality improvement targets, whether they relate to the aborted call rate, incident resolution times, criteria for determining how vital an application is to the business, or escalation times.

Tera 100: Europe’s first supercomputer to break the Petaflops barrier

• European Number One, with a performance of 1.05 Petaflops
• One of the most efficient supercomputer in its category, with proven efficiency of almost 84% according to the LINPACK benchmark
• A general-purpose supercomputer, designed to run the CEA-DAM’s Simulation program 24 hours a day
Tera 100 has officially broken the Petaflops barrier, by recording a performance of 1.05 Petaflops in the LINPACK benchmark test, for a peak performance of 1.25 Petaflops. This performance means it ranked as the most powerful supercomputer in Europe, and as the 6th in the world, in the TOP 500 listing published in mid-November 2010 - and still number 1 in Europe in the June 2011 TOP 500 listing! Its 83.7% efficiency rating, one of the highest among all the supercomputers in its class, and its performance clearly demonstrate the quality of the design work carried out by the teams from Bull and CEA-DAM (the Military Applications Division of the French Alternative Energies and Atomi

An Optimized, consistent and scalable storage infrastructure

Due to diverse activities (nuclear energy, life sciences, material sciences, climate and environment study, technological research and education), the French Atomic Agency is facing growing storage requirements related to increased data processing and information management needs. In order to provide coherent and efficient storage solutions for its 10 centres and 20 partners, the CEA and Bull carried out a complete reassessment of its storage infrastructure establishing a consistent SAN/NAS architecture based on NetApp technology - easy to administer, scalable and supporting multiple protocols. The new infrastructure offers the CEA a nationwide perspective and improved cost control. Bull's expertise in heterogeneous system management, the contribution of the Bull StoreWay Excellence Center and the strong partnership with NetApp have enabled the successful migration to new technologies, the integration of Microsoft Exchange and VMware, the implementation of both Backup & Data Recovery

Cenaero has acquired a Bull supercomputer of about 3300 cores

A specialist in modelling methodologies and software for complex industrial problems in various areas of applied mechanics, Cenaero required a new HPC platform to match their rapidly increasing computing needs. Cenaero awarded a public supply contract to ServiWare, a Bull Group company, for the installation of a supercomputer of about 3300 cores supplying a computing power of close to 40 TFLOPS. This supercomputer is housed in a mobile data centre based on the mobull solution developed by Bull, namely a 14 meter-long container able to host eventually 15 IT racks.

Certinomis, the French certification authority, calls on Bull to help secure its business activities

Certinomis is a Certification Authority and subsidiary of Docapost, the holding company for the solutions and documentation services companies of La Poste, the French Post Office. Certinomis, which was established in 2000, uses its full range of skills to support businesses, financial institutions and public sector organizations; offering them a full range of digital certificates. To respond to the demands of a market that is undergoing radical restructuring and take on board the new general security database (the référentiel général de sécurité or RGS) set up by the French government, Certinomis wanted to rework its production system… Certinomis turned to Bull for this project, which required both the ability to understand its business challenges, in-depth technical expertise and rigorous project management. Bull met these expectations by putting forward a hosted solution based on MetaPKI, its digital certificate management software, fully integrated with Bull TrustWayTM encryption de

Bull modernizes CNAF’s core business applications

The Caisse Nationale d’Allocations Familiales (CNAF) – the family branch of the French social security system, which provided some €69 billion of benefits to 11 million claimants in 2009 – has turned to Bull to migrate its Interel-RFM2 database running under gcos8 to PostgreSQL. The decision is a reaffirmation of CNAF’s commitment to move towards Open Source solutions. As a result of this, every month PostgreSQL is involved in the payment of €3 billion in benefits. The project, which is now fully up and running, is an integral part of the program to transform the information systems of this highly sensitive organization, which will soon have to bring on board new initiatives such as the RSA. The migration project started in October 2008, following a feasibility study carried out by Bull and a prototype built in collaboration with CNAF’s teams. An extensive testing phase established a sound basis for the implementation, which took place over the nine months to April 2010.

Bull supports CNIM for over a decade as its information system evolves

CNIM (the Mediterranean Naval and Industrial Construction company) is a major French group operating on an international scale, whose business is to design and deliver turnkey industrial installations with significant technological content. In order to grow its business, the group depends on its strong core values, such as creativity, commitment and responsiveness. CNIM’s information system reflects those values. Thanks to its agility, it has been able to fit in with the group’s acquisitions policy, especially over the past decade. Because it is flexible, it has constantly adapted to keep pace with the group’s projects, some of them valued at several billion euros. And its responsiveness meets the needs of an international engineering firm that manages over 60 Terabytes of technical data.Bull has contributed to the evolution of this information system by cultivating a strong partnership with CNIM and making a long-term commitment to work alongside this multi-faceted group.

Bull outsources the ERP of CNRS, the first European research organization

With more than 32,000 employees, and a budget of €3.367 billion budget, the CNRS is the first European research organization. With 16 Nobel laureates and 9 Fields Medals, it has a long tradition of excellence. Within the framework of its organization project, the CNRS wanted to modernize its main IT applications : Sirhus, for human resources administration and salary management for CNRS employees, and BFC for budget execution monitoring, spending, projects, revenue, financial monitoring of research contracts and budget accounting. A consortium, including Bull, has been chosen to build the technical architecture and take care of progressive and corrective maintenance, as well as outsource, the two Escala systems, based on SAP. Bull has notably been charged with the outsourcing of the systems.

Keeping watch over Europe’s electricity networks

Three of Europe’s main TCOs (RTE in France, Elia in Belgium and the UK’s National Grid) joined forces to take equal shares in a new enterprise, known as Coreso. Its aim was precisely to provide its shareholder-customers with global information about the security of the transmission networks in Central Western Europe, 24×7. To do its job of analyzing, providing information and advising its members, Coreso has put together a 15-strong team of experts and equipped itself with state-of-the-art information system.Bull was chosen to deliver this outsourcing service, which is unusual in the range of technical skills it requires. In effect, it involves guaranteeing not only the high availability of the industrial hardware located at Lomme, but also the confidentiality of the mission-critical information being exchanged between Coreso and the TCOs, as well as highly responsive on-site desktop maintenance.

Ile-de-France Regional Council uses Open Source with Bull to enable flexible rationalization

Ways of using public services are changing fast, The largest Regional Council in France, the Ile-De-France Council wanted to be ready to meet rapidly the needs of new reforms like the RGPP1. For that, the organization has embarked on some major programs to make its Information Systems more agile and powerful, leveraging Open Source as a way of reducing the life cycle of projects, making savings in the very short term but also guaranteing transparency and, above all, responsiveness, to rapidly control the way the projects evolve depending on changing needs. To enable these actions, the Council has chosen to use Bull’s NovaForge platform for several of its software developments… Today more than 25 PHP, J2EE or Java projects are hosted on NovaForge. The objective is to gradually extend the use of this tool across the whole organization, so the Council can use it to host the Ile de France Regional Council’s application base.

Dassault Aviation: a world first in secured industrial design

The Falcon 7X business jet from Dassault Aviation was designed using a virtual platform secured by Bull. Around 1,000 engineers from 20 partners in six countries from Western Europe and North America worked together remotely on the detailed design of the aircraft. Dassault Aviation aeronautical designer and manufacturer had total and permanent visibility of the data: availability and sharing of data enabled the Falcon 7X to be developed on schedule and with a record level of quality and productivity improvement. “This platform was only possible with an infrastructure based on trust” said Jean-Paul Weber, Chief Security Officer at Dassault Aviation. “The Bull offering demonstrated its effectiveness during intensive intrusion tests.” The system is based on a dual security level – powerful user authentication and VPN network security – a solution that guarantees optimum security of the architecture.

Dassault Aviation uses bullx to boost computer simulation

For cutting-edge aeronautical companies, the age of wooden mock-ups and innumerable prototypes is long gone. Nowadays, designing an aircraft is an extremely hi-tech process, and computer simulation is at the very heart of the process. As a major player in both civil and military aeronautics, and a first-rate enterprise in terms of its computerization, Dassault Aviation has a very sophisticated Data Center for its intensive computing. The constant search for greater and greater levels of precision in the simulation of physical properties – these days, several million points are mapped when modeling the structure of an aircraft – requires ever more processing power. Dassault Aviation is constantly upgrading its HPC environment to meet these demands. Most recently, it has been further strengthened with the addition of two bullx clusters.

Dassault Aviation: an innovative approach to software maintenance and support

In 2000, the IT Department was set the task of reducing costs while maintaining control over service quality. A detailed analysis of activities highlighted the complexity of both software maintenance and support, and the impact these were having on costs. The figures speak for themselves: an installed base of 1,000 applications, more than 160 registered suppliers … and spending constantly on the increase. One basic fact stood out: there was insufficient visibility of software being bought and maintained. As a result, Dassault Aviation set out to improve productivity in this complex area. With a well-established software support business, and a particular interest in this issue, Bull was the obvious choice for Dassault Aviation to support them in their deliberations. These joint efforts, over few months, have culminated in the implementation of an innovative service based on commitment to results, and a mechanism that enables both parties to share in the rewards.

DCNS takes an industrial approach to developing on-board systems software with Bull

DCNS is a leading European player on the world market for naval defense systems. The Group designs, builds and supports surface combatants, submarines and mission-critical systems and equipment incorporating the most advanced technologies. On the strength of its work on the NovaForge collaborative development platform, based on Open Source, Bull has been responsible for software engineering services (modeling, tooling...) for DCNS since 2006. From a very early stage, Bull has supported the GEMO (GEneric and MOdular) open architecture developed by DCNS for its new-generation Combat Management System. Bull's investments in this innovative architecture has helped it to rapidly win a growing amount of business working on DNCS' large-scale programs such as the new-generation strategic nuclear ballistic missile submarine 'Le Terrible' and its FREMM multi-purpose frigates.

Deutsche Bahn controls 1 million user accounts to align security and business processes

Deutsche Bahn, one of Europe’s principal transport operators, has decided to implement an identity management system, to ensure full control over the access that its 60,000 users have to some 800 business applications. Having carried out a comprehensive assessment of the available solutions, the operator chose the solution from Bull Evidian, European leader in Identity and Access Management (IAM). Evidian’s main advantage was its user-centered approach, analyzing and controlling access to a million user accounts at Deutsche Bahn in line with business processes. As a result, the company will be able to strengthen its internal control procedures, and carry out continual audits to ensure that only authorized users have access to its strategic applications. Another guarantee of excellence for Deutsche Bahn.

Bull to host and operate mon.service-public.fr

As part of its mission to modernize the way that government operates and is managed, the DGME (French State Modernization Agency) has launched a vast program aimed at simplifying administrative processes, for all users of public services. At the heart of this program, mon.service-public.fr enables users to carry out numerous tasks on line, monitor the progress of their interactions and save documents published by the government and its partners in a secure area of the site. This mass-market application - which is destined to receive several tens of millions of hits a year - has to respond to highly exacting requirements in terms of availability, security of exchanges, confidentiality of personal data and robustness. In total, almost 130 servers have been deployed to run the integration, pre-production and production environments. The application is being hosted and operated at a Bull Data Center in two independent cold sites, running 24x7 with 99.8% availability.

The DGME calls on Bull to help implement a new approach to on-line public service delivery

As part of its role to modernize the way that the French State operates and is managed, the State Modernization Agency, the DGME (Direction Générale de la Modernisation de l'État) has chosen Bull to develop a new 'factory' for the creation and optimization of new approaches to on-line services. Putting government services on line involves implementing a generic platform which takes into account the constant evolution of on-line services offerings and responds to extremely demanding constraints in terms of timescales, security and costs. Bull and its partners have been chosen to define the functionality of the 'on-line services factory' which will guarantee this kind of agility. The 'factory' will consist of five functional areas: dialogue and recording of requests, submission of requests, monitoring of requests, supervision and administration. It will enable new computerized services to be automatically designed, formalized and put on line.

High Performance Computing plays its role in the fight against cancer

New techniques for calculating planned radiation doses delivered in the course of external radiotherapy cancer treatments bring a tremendous increase in precision. However a large amount of compute power is needed to achieve enough precision in an acceptable calculation time for clinical application. This is precisely the issue addressed by Bull’s HPC Centre of Expertise, which studied the problem and delivered a supercomputer adapted to the task in hand. Since it would be impractical for every radiotherapy center to install this kind of computer, it was decided to set up a service that can be supplied on demand to hospitals.

e-merchant: objective100% availability for e-commerce

Part of the Fotovista group which is active in more than 26 countries, e-merchant provides a complete e-commerce platform for numerous brands including Pixmania, Bouygues Telecom, PC World and Dixons. The major Business requirement was to provide a 100% available e-commerce platform with Business Continuity provision. Moreover, the storage infrastructure needed to be able to handle peak capacity and performance loads, as well as to host new e-Business sites. Bull delivered an innovative solution based on NetApp FAS6000 storage using MetroCluster, with data replication between primary and backup data centers, more than 40 km distant. The Disaster Recovery solution guarantees real-time replication of critical data and 100% availability to date.

Bull secure EADS Astrium

EADS Astrium is the European specialist in space transport and orbital infrastructures. It designs, develops and produces Ariane rockets, the Columbus laboratory and the ATV cargo for the international space station, atmospheric return vehicles, French defence missiles, propulsion systems and space equipment. In order to safeguard its sensitive information systems, EADS Astrium was looking to create a total user management and access control infrastructure. Bull Evidian security software has been deployed in order to facilitate management, authentication, access control, SSO and audit.

EADS Astrium, 1rst provider of space technologies in Europe launches a deployment with Evidian

Astrium (a subsidiary of EADS) is Europe’s #1 provider of space technologies and the worldwide #3. EADS Astrium deployed Evidian Enterprise SSO internally, along with Evidian’s provisioning system. On user’s stations, Evidian’s software provides single sign-on access to client/server and web applications, while Evidian User Provisioning automates account creation, management and removal. In addition, two secure web portals were established, based on Evidian’s Web Access Manager. With the first portal, partners access web resources with client-less SSO. The second portal is designed for EADS Astrium employees. After an exhaustive market study, Evidian was chosen for its ability to provide all needed features within a coherent, integrated environment.

EDF chooses Bull to help it get more from its SAP data, using SAS.

The Electricité de France (EDF) Group is Europe's leading producer, distributor and supplier of electricity.
As the French electricity market was opening to competition, highly powerful business intelligence (BI) solutions needed to be implemented to enable better understanding of customers, more effective management of marketing activities and the creation of new types of products and services. The SAS solution was chosen because it allows access to detailed data for data mining purposes, even when very large volumes of data are involved. The hardware architecture is based around one Bull Escala server for customer relationship management (CRM) and billing activities running on SAP and Oracle, and a second Bull Escala server for SAS BI.

The Escala servers offer the high levels of power and scalability required by EDF, thanks in particular to their virtualization and micro-partitioning capabilities.

Erste Bank: Reducing cost and increasing service levels through virtualisation

Founded in 1819, Erste Bank is one of the oldest and largest banking groups in Austria, and a major player in the development of the Central European finance sector. The customer needed to reduce costs and improve the manageability of its IT infrastructure through the consolidation of 300 Intel servers. There was also a requirement to improve Business Continuity. Bull first delivered a pilot system using VMware and EMC CLARiiON storage to prove the efficiency of the solution hosting Windows and Linux applications. Bull then managed the full deployment of the solution based on 500 virtual servers that ensure 99.99% availability of applications and support Disaster Recovery with Vmotion and Vmware HA. In addition, the customer benefits from optimised capital investment, and reduced operational costs through energy saving and reduced space.

The European Union adopts globull™

The General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union (GSC EU) has acquired globull devices – the encryption-protected mobile office designed and developed by Bull – with the aim of equipping its diplomatic staff. The GSC EU’s 3,500 officers often need to travel and take with them highly confidential documents. For a number of years now, as part of its NOMAD project, the GSC EU has been looking for a reliable, easy-to-use solution that combines security and mobility. globull, with its defense-standard technologies, carefully-designed ergonomics and smart look & feel, has won over the INFOSEC experts at the General Secretariat. After rigorous testing, configuration and trialing program, globull was officially presented to the 27 member States of the EU.

Bull provides supercomputing power to European research into nuclear fusion

Thanks to the Bull supercomputer for the Jülich Research Center, research into nuclear fusion has access to European computer simulation resources for the first time. The Bull HPC-FF supercomputer with 100 Teraflops-capacity hosts applications for the European Union Fusion community. Alongside the Bull JuRoPA supercomputer ordered in 2008, it forms an integrated computing platform delivering more than 300 Teraflops of processing power, taking a lead-position among Europe's supercomputers. HPC-FF will help speed up research into nuclear fusion, and put Europe in the lead when it comes to providing scientific support to the ITER project.

The Forschungszentrum Jülich chooses Bull to deliver a 200-Tflops supercomputer for JuRoPa

The Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany's leading HPC center and the instigator of the JuRoPa project, aimed at accelerating the development of high performance cluster computing in Europe, has acquired from Bull a supercomputer with a performance of 200 Teraflops, deployed in 2009 and integrated within the Jülich's datacenter network. The JUROPA project (which stands for "Jülich Research on Petaflops Architectures") was set up by the Forschungszentrum Jülich to investigate emerging cluster technologies and achieve a new class of cost-efficient supercomputers for peta-scale computing.

Data Protection of emails and critical SAP applications for Freudenberg IT

A Part of the Freudenberg manufacturing group, Freudenberg IT is an international IT services provider delivering consultancy, implementation and hosting services for SAP environments for small and medium-sized enterprises. Freudenberg IT needed to protect diverse Windows environment from PC-based office files and email management to mission-critical SAP applications. The Bull solution protects 80 TB of data generated by 400 PCs and 200 Microsoft Windows servers running Exchange, SQL Server and SAP applications. The data protection solution is based on StoreWay Calypso, powered by CommVault Simpana. Implemented by the customer himself and easy to administrate, the flexible and scalable architecture provides tiered storage with email and file archiving, in addition to content indexing and data deduplication.

CURIE speeds up European research

GENCI's CURIE supercomputer - designed by Bull - opens up unprecedented new possibilities for academic and industrial research in Europe. The equivalent of reading two billion books in just one second: that's the level of performance which the CURIE supercomputer - designed by Bull for GENCI (the French National High-Performance Computing Organization) and now being made available research purposes - is capable of. Over the past two decades, supercomputers have become essential tools for researchers, helping them to model and simulate complex phenomena, in ever more detail, in a way that traditional experimentation could never achieve. The greater the performance and capacity of supercomputers, the more precise and realistic the computer models and simulations become. CURIE - which is capable of up to 2 Petaflop/s - consists of more than 92,000 processing cores, linked to a system that can store 15 Petabytes at a speed of 250Gbit/s.

Planet 51 designed by Ilion Animation Studios on a Bull supercomputer

The design of a 3D animated movie is one of the most intensive computer-aided tasks, both in terms of computing power and hardware ressources. The Planet 51 movie project was born in 2002. Since then, Ilion Animation Studios has created an entire parallel universe around Planet 51 using leading-edge technologies. The result is an incredible visual experience which cannot be compared with any other animated film. Over 350 people from more than 20 countries have worked on Planet 51 – including designers, developers, engineers and many other professionals – with a budget of some $70 million. Ilion Animation Studios, which has designed the 3D animation of Planet 51, has chosen Bull to design and upgrade its server farm dedicated to graphics rendering. “We were impressed by Bull’s remarkable ability to design and configure solutions in extremely critical situations, involving a multitude of systems and, above all, very strict deadlines,” explains Gonzalo Rueda, IT Director at Ilion.

Bull, CEA, F4E and JAEA inaugurate the Helios supercomputer dedicated to the Nuclear Fusion program

The supercomputer, installed in Rokkasho (Japan) and delivering over 1.5 Petaflops, will provide the computer modeling and simulation capabilities needed for the 'Broader Approach' program, linked to the ITER initiative. The Helios supercomputer is the third Petascale supercomputer designed and developed by Bull to go into operational production in the past 18 months. In April 2011, the CEA (the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission), acting on behalf of F4E (Fusion For Energy), chose Bull to equip the new data center being built at Rokkasho in Japan, under the auspices of the International Fusion Energy Research Center (IFERC). The data center is one of the key components of the 'Broader Approach'; a research program designed to complement ITER and launched in November 2006 as part of a cooperation between Japan and Europe.

New Bull supercomputer powers weather and climate research at Royal Netherlands Meteorological Insti

KNMI, the Dutch national institute for weather, climate research and seismology, has aquired a new Bull supercomputer that is is forty times more powerful than their current system. This offers KNMI more opportunities to issue early warnings in case of extreme weather. It also enhances KNMI's capabilities for climate research. According to Frits Brouwer, KNMI director, KNMI has selected Bull for its comprehensive solution: "The hardware, combined with Bull's knowledge support, gives us confidence in our cooperation. With Bull, we expect to have found the right partner who is able to address our computing needs for the coming years."

La Poste relies on Bull to modernize, consolidate and secure its IT production sites

The French Post Office (La Poste) has entrusted Bull with the relocation and hosting of its server network on eight production sites on two Bull industrial, highly secure sites. The project includes 1,733 servers and 870 network installations hosted in 500 racks. Bull's know-how when it comes to data center 'urbanization' has enabled the Group to provide the entire package of system engineering, processes, tools and project management, with a strong emphasis on risk management. "In addition to a highly professional relocation process, it was the joint efforts of our teams and the quality of the manpower that made the difference. All the transfers were successful, as was the switch-over to on-going secure contractual arrangements. What's more, this was achieved against a backdrop of especially demanding user requirements for service continuity and the need to guarantee instantaneous business recovery," explains Michel Delattre, IT Director, La Poste.

LUMC, institute specialized in complex diseases

LUMC, one of the leading university and research hospitals in The Netherlands, relies on Bull to design a future-ready storage environment The Leids Universitair Medisch Centrum (LUMC) is a center for medical innovation striving to improve patient care through Research and development. The objective is to educate medical staff at all levels, both specialists and general practicioners to contribute towards this goal. LUMC differentiates itself as a leading institute for complex medical cases where there are no standard answers. Concise, manageable, expandable and secure storage is one of the key factors to support the researchers and specialists in their constant quest to find the right cure for a constant flow of new and exotic illnesses and diseases. Bull was chosen to design and implement this business-critical storage environment based on Bull’s professional capabilities, vision and proven track record.

Mutualité Sociale Agricole (MSA) chooses Bull to supply the majority of its IT infrastructure.

MSA, the second largest social insurance provider in France, covers all types of social protection (health, family services, services for the elderly, subscriptions ) for those involved in the agricultural industry (farmers, agricultural workers and companies): a total of over 4 million people. MSA's business represents almost E30 billion worth of services.
MSA has used Bull Escala large-scale servers for its main production applications running under AIX for a number of years.

MSA made the decision to work with Bull not only on its Escala AIX servers, but also its NovaScale Intel-based servers and data storage solutions across all six of its production centers. As a result, Bull is very proud to be the supplier of the vast majority of MSA's IT infrastructure.

A large investment bank secures its trading desks

Natixis’ 750 traders buy and sell a large amount of financial instruments to support the bank’s corporate and investment banking, investment activity and specialized financial services. As trading is a core strategic process, Natixis closely supervises traders with internal controls. Through Evidian’s integration with Hitachi’s VeinID finger vein authentication, traders authenticate without carrying any devices. This gives them flexibility and fast access to the stations in their trading desk. And with Evidian’s single sign-on, assistants and traders do not need to enter any application password, enhancing productivity. Still, by analyzing suspicions of fraud in other banks, Natixis realized that authentication was a weak link in the control chain. Evidian was selected for its Authentication Manager and Enterprise SSO software. The combined solution was the most satisfactory in terms of reliability, features and regulatory compliance.

High-end storage at nWave Digital

russels based nWave Digital has just installed an EMC Isilon storage system, distributed by Bull, in response to the growing needs of its designers and graphics artists for storage capacity. In nWave Digital’s case, the ‘render farm’ – the collection of virtual servers that provides the designers with the processing power they need to create, simulate and assemble each frame of the movie – is teamed with a highly specific and rigorous file storage system.

Mobile communications take off with Bull and OnAir

Whether for business or personal reasons, being able to make phone calls and connect to the Internet while you are on a plane is something many passengers really want. Thanks to OnAir, this is now possible on over 10,000 flights a month to 280 destinations, in more than 70 countries. Set up in 2005 by SITA, the specialist in telecommunications for the global aviation sector, and the European aircraft manufacturer Airbus, OnAir has developed an in-flight system for mobile phone calls via satellite. With Bull’s help, what was originally an enticing idea has now become a flexible and robust commercial proposition which has already won over many prestigious airlines.

Bull signs BOA with NATO NC3A

Bull has signed a Basic Ordering Agreement (BOA) with NATO Consultation, Command and Control Agency (NC3A). Under the BOA, Bull is entitled to compete on bids that NATO issues within the range of products and services that Bull focusses on. Bull helps leading players build the new defense technologies of tomorrow.

PaperlinX relies on Bull to standardize and centralize its complete IT infrastructure

PaperlinX is one of the world's largest distributors of paper, sign & display products and packaging materials. By outsourcing its IT to Bull, PaperlinX wanted to reduce costs, raise its service levels and focus on its core activities. Within the contract, Bull is responsible for the datacenter operations of PaperlinX, as well as the desktop management and helpdesk activities for 4500 users. PaperlinX Europe has 22 branch offices in 16 countries, that, until now, all had their own IT strategy, datacenter and IT staff. Within the agreement, all servers in the 22 datacenters of PaperlinX will be consolidated and centralized utilizing market-leading virtualization techniques, thereby reducing more than 700 Linux and Windows servers to about 80 servers. The virtualized servers are to be housed in Bull's newly opened datacenter in Barnsley, UK. The entire infrastructure is backed up to a second datacenter in the Netherlands.

Global leader secures all its international sites end to end

PAREXEL, the world leader in pharmaceutical tests, manages medical data on thousands of voluntary subjects, on behalf of the biggest manufacturers in the sector. Its security requirements are, therefore, very high including very cumbersome manual identification procedures, with hundreds of applications and resources. So, PAREXEL decided to simplify and reinforce the security of access to its applications. All the passwords would be replaced with smartcard and proximity-detector-based single sign-on (SSO), which would guarantee both logical and physical security, simply. After investigating leading suppliers in the market, PAREXEL chose Evidian’s IAM Suite solution. A pilot installation enabled PAREXEL to successfully test the software on a significant sample of the company’s 600 systems and 300 applications. Evidian’s authentication system is a critical link in this chain of confidence which was integrated in a non-intrusive manner into a directory environment with several domains.

Bull supplies a new supercomputer for Petrobras

Petrobras is the leader in the Brazilian petrochemical sector. It operates in the sectors of exploration and production, refining, commerce, transport and distribution of petrochemical products, natural gas, bio-fuel and other renewable energy sources, and ambitions to be among the five biggest integrated energy companies in the world by 2020. CENPES, its Research and Development Centre, has chosen a bullx supercomputer equiped with GPU accelerator technology to develop its of new subsurface imaging techniques using geophysical methods to support oil exploration and production. This supercomputer, with over 250 Teraflops of computing power, will be one of the largest and most powerful computers in Latin America.

PGNiG gets closer to its customers thank to Bull

In 2007, following the liberalization of the country’s energy market, PGNiG (Polskie Gornictwo Naftowe i Gazownictwo), the largest Polish oil and gas company, was looking for a partner whose know-how and technology would enable it to implement a new communications strategy and Internet-based customer service mechanisms, in very short timescales. AMG.net (Bull subsidiary) was chosen to be that partner. AMG.net provided both its portal technology and many years of experience and expertise, based on designing mass-market customer services systems for large companies, including TPSA, the country’s biggest operator). It's a first-rate IT project meeting PGNiG’s high standards for data security and systems integration.

Bull integrates the new commercial system for Phil@poste: the first stage in its IS overhaul.

To encourage the implementation of best practice and ensure optimum control, Phil@poste – part of the French Post Office's mail division – has chosen bull to integrate its new commercial management system. The new, unified system is based on InforLN ERP software, as well as I-flow for workflow management and Cognos for operational reporting.

Bull: playing a vital role in the French employment office's information systems

Created at the end of 2008, Pole emploi is the new body responsible for employment in France. Bull is playing a key role in this vast transformation project, participating in six separate programs of work. Bull is directly involved in open systems engineering projects and methodologies for developing Java and Cobol frameworks, which will be central to the business applications of the future. Bull is also involved in several large-scale BI projects, including SID (the new BI system), datamining, finance and fraud prevention. As Daniel Urbani, Deputy Managing Director of Information Systems at Pôle Emploi explains: “Bull’s responsiveness and its ability to understand our needs are real advantages given the transformation that has to be achieved.”The teams involved at Bull are organized into ‘service centers’, so appropriate resources can be mobilized wherever they are needed, while sharing the same project vision. They are all using Bull's NovaForge™ software development platform.

Bull supports Radio France in its all-digital strategy

Radio France is constantly fine-tuning itself to the new ways in which its listeners consume its output. Over the years, Radio France – which has made a clear commitment to an all-digital future – has become a leader in offering radio podcasts and has established itself on the social networks where it has met real success with, of all things, its videos! In an age when the dissemination of information is undergoing radical transformation, with Bull’s help Radio France is rethinking one of the core elements of its digital strategy: its communications infrastructure. This huge change is taking place against a backdrop of the refurbishment of its iconic headquarters, which began in 2004. As digital technology becomes more widespread, the way radio is used changes, and new demands are being placed on the business, updating the network is an integral part of a massive program, designed to deliver high levels of added value, at the core of Radio France’s business.

Randstad relies on Bull to secure and hosts its information systems

Vedior Group France, a major player in the human resources sector, relies on Bull to host its production information system, which consists of more than 500 heterogeneous servers, along with its Web servers. Vedior's objective was to to secure and make reliable a highly scalable infrastructure that must deliver high levels of service continuity with absolute confidentiality, while rationalizing IT costs. Bull is now hosting Vedior's information system on its main outsourcing centre; the web servers are being hosted by Agarik, a Bull Group company specialized in critical web hosting. "Every day, some 900 branch offices and 4,200 users depend on Vedior's information system, via a web server, to put potential job candidates and enterprises in touch with one another. We have to provide extremely high levels of service and security," underlined Hugues de Maussion, CIO of Randstad France. "The architecture being implemented enables us to rationalize our servers"

Languedoc Roussillon Regional Council calls on Bull to modernize its information system

The Languedoc Roussillon Regional Council is relying on an ambitious IT masterplan to build a reliable information system that delivers significant added value. The system will not only have to meet business needs, but also reflect the global action strategy set out in the ‘Regional Pact.Whether they are designed to support the local population directly or to contribute to the development of innovative business practices within the regional authority, the projects that Bull is carrying out will all contribute significantly to meeting the Region’s objectives: Bull has designed, developed and is responsible for the continued evolution of ‘@gile’, a portal that provides a single interface between high-schools and the Regional Council. Bull was responsible for leading and delivering the SIGEP project: a Business Intelligence system designed to evaluate public services actions and to respond to the needs expressed by the various functions within the Council.

RWTH Aachen University orders Bull supercomputer

The North Rhine-Westphalia Technical University (RWTH or Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule) in Aachen - one of the nine German 'Universities of Excellence' with about 33 000 students - has chosen a bullx supercomputer. The new system, featuring over 28,000 processing cores, will deliver some 300 Teraflops of power and three Petabytes of disk storage, and will give the University a significant advantage when it comes to running computer simulations that reflect reality as closely as possible. In addition, the University's Center for Computing and Communication and Bull have signed a collaboration agreement aimed at optimizing applications that may be useful to industry in heterogeneous cluster environments and in the area of 'Green IT'.

sanofi-aventis selects Bull Evidian to secure its workstations

A global pharmaceutical group, sanofi-aventis is mainly involved in pharmacy, human vaccines and animal health. The company is subject to strict requirements in terms of security, confidentiality and data integrity. The 15,000 research and development employees of sanofi-aventis must therefore individually authenticate to a large number of applications. The Group launched an evaluation of the world’s leading providers of authentication management and SSO. The criteria: the solution must be easy to install and deploy, and be able to integrate a large variety of applications, online medical databases, document management, internal Windows and Unix applications and terminal emulation. After live tests, sanofi-aventis selected Bull Evidian.

Bull supports the Seine-Maritime local authority in a large-scale BI project

Seine-Maritime has embarked on a wide-ranging, cross-functional Business Intelligence (BI) implementation project, to face constraints imposed by the current socio-economic climate, and to better monitor government policies with indicators and aggregate data. Bull has implemented a consolidated architecture consisting of Bull Escala servers that meets the authority’s needs in terms of ease of operation, scalability, service continuity and power-on-demand. The BI solution is built around SAP Business Objects.

25 healthcare establishments choose Bull Evidian to secure access to health data

25 healthcare establishments in the North of France choose Bull and its subsidiary Evidian to secure access to health data. Following a 15-month competitive tendering process involving two other nationally recognized companies, the Bull-Evidian-Altasys alliance has won a four-year contract with each of the members of the procurement consortium. The contract covers the purchase, implementation and maintenance of an access control solution featuring strong authentication based on digital certificates, as well as associated program management services for the 25 healthcare establishments from across the region who are members of the ‘Access and authentication’ procurement consortium being coordinated by the inter-hospital healthcare IT syndicate in Nord-Pas de Calais (SiiH 59/62), as part of the move to comply with the French government’s ‘confidentiality’ directive.

Power on demand for Société Générale

Financial services require powerful analysis and modeling tools. To answer these needs, Extreme Computing helps organizations constantly push back the boundaries of computer simulation, modeling and digital analysis. SG CIB, Société Générale Corporate and Investment Banking, was looking for a solution that would give it both the performance it needed and great flexibility of use. So SG CIB turned to Bull, whose HPC-on-demand offering corresponded to its demands: power, flexibility, responsiveness, high levels of security, commitment and cost control. Bull not only provides servers but also network infrastructure, security, hosting and associated services. Not only the architecture itself, but also the way the services are delivered, are set up to absorb Société Générale’s extra demands and respond to peaks in workload, to meet their changing needs, especially when they are carrying out complex calculations around share derivatives or risk management.

Senegal's leading telecom operator facilitates and secures IT access.

Sonatel, Senegal's first telephone company, now provides telephone (land and cellular), internet, television and data services to over 5 million customers in Africa. A 42% owned subsidiary of France Telecom, Sonatel is Senegal's leading telecom company and has become the top provider of mobile telephone services in Mali. Until now, administrators had to update accounts on a case by case basis, with 5 to 7 applications per user. And each employee had to manage as many passwords on a daily basis. Sonatel's general managers therefore decided to invest in an overall identity and access management solution. Sonatel selected Evidian's offer. The functional criteria were met and Evidian was able to demonstrate its hands-on experience in the telecommunications market. From now on, this solution will let Sonatel manage its users and assign them access rights to resources in a uniform, universal, and quick fashion.

Total chooses Bull for its access control security

Total is a leading multinational energy company with over 110,000 employees and operations in more than 130 countries. Together with its subsidiaries and affiliates, Total is the fourth largest publicly-traded oil and gas integrated company in the world. Total has chosen Bull Evidian Enterprise SSO to simplify password management and secure access to its applications using smart cards. The aim is also to improve usability and security (rigorous user identification, access control according to user profiles, audits and alarms), while at the same time reducing the support costs associated with the management of passwords

Non-stop e-commerce service delivery at Wehkamp

Wehkamp has long been the market leader in home shopping in the Netherlands. Having already replaced mailorder with telephone ordering as its principle sales channel, from the early years of this decade the company has enthusiastically embraced e-commerce. With immediate success: to the point where 80% of its orders now come via the Web. By totally modernizing its infrastructurewith Bull, the dutch home shopping specialist has succeeded in fundamentally tranformings its business.

Xerox chooses bullion to virtualize its critical business applications

Having acquired ACS in 2010, Xerox has become the world leader in managed document services. In France, Xerox has around 15 production sites. The IT Department at Xerox France wanted to share the physical resources from all its environments, including Windows. Since bullion is based on engineering principles from the mainframe world and high-availability systems is was the ideal platform. Today, Xerox is using five bullion servers. They run core business applications that use a lot of CPU time and memory. These applications . Despite the range of applications and their needs, the workload was well managed. Overall, the new infrastructure offers 99.997% availability, 24×7, 365 days a year. Finally, as well as the economies of scale provided by virtualization, the resulting reduction in the number of physical machines and the design of bullion (especially its patented active/passive power supply), will help cut energy consumption significantly, by around 30%.

A modernized storage infrastructure to support Zain Gabon’s growth

With its dynamic expansion strategy, Zain is today the leading Telco operator in the Middle East and Africa, covering 22 countries including Gabon with 830,000 subscribers. To support its growth and continue to offer innovative services to its customers, Zain Gabon wanted to rationalize its IT infrastructures with a global storage solution that would guarantee protection, consolidation, backup and archiving of its business data. The chosen infrastructure is built on EMC hardware and software solutions with a SAN-hosted CLARiiON storage array. Secure access management, regular backup and data replication guarantee maximum availability of information. With its local presence and expertise, Bull implemented the entire project from design to deployment, with the support of experts from EMC. Deployed in less than six months, the new infrastructure has immediately resulted in reduced maintenance costs and improved response times.