Vestas moves to Azure high-performance computing for reliability, performance, and scalability

A matter of sustainability

Vestas has avoided 1.9 billion tons of CO2 through the company’s work designing, building, installing, and maintaining wind turbines and other renewable energy sources around the planet. That’s the equivalent of taking millions of cars off the road for a year (Source: United States Environmental Protection Agency). “We want to be the world’s most sustainable energy company,” says Kim Emil Andersen, Senior Vice President of Applications, Controls and Electrical at Vestas. “And we are constantly seeking ways to improve performance and decrease our carbon footprint.”

To remain a leader in the increasingly competitive non-fossil energy space, Vestas needs to respond quickly to customer needs. It depends on a powerful and robust IT infrastructure to facilitate that effort and run the company’s key workloads, which include Vestas Turbine Simulator and Vestas Climate Library. 

Wind turbines are complicated feats of engineering. They offer a wide variety of configuration options to optimize power generation and maximize equipment life, based on Vestas Climate Library data about the installation site. “Choosing the right turbine model and configuring it properly can also save tons of materials over the turbine lifetime, which promotes sustainable development and reduces costs,” explains Peter Enevoldsen, Vice President and Module Owner of Modelling & Analytics at Vestas. “In a multi-turbine wind field, it is essential that individual turbines are placed in a way that optimizes performance of the entire field."

To achieve these goals, Vestas relies on Vestas Turbine Simulator and Vestas Climate Library. Vestas Turbine Simulator performs advanced simulations of turbine models and configurations combined with atmospheric data stored in Vestas Climate Library to select the best model and options for the job and location. “Vestas Climate Library is a vast database of information—several petabytes and growing—about climate conditions at every area on the Earth’s land mass, starting at ground level and extending into the atmosphere at 60 intervals,” says Mark Žagar, Senior Specialist at Vestas. “We use this data combined with site-specific measurements with VTS to choose individual turbines and to configure wind fields for peak performance.”

These calculations require vast amounts of computing power, and in the past Vestas accomplished them with an on-premises supercomputer. It provided excellent results but had trouble keeping up with the backlog queue of requests and suffered from occasional reliability issues. As a result, Vestas was missing out on sales opportunities because the company couldn’t complete the necessary simulations of customer opportunities in time to meet proposal deadlines. So, the company sought a cloud alternative.

Supercomputing in the cloud

Vestas had a strong existing relationship with Microsoft but still did a thorough evaluation of competing providers to determine the best platform for a new cloud-based infrastructure. The company measured the alternatives against a wide range of criteria and chose Microsoft Azure and Azure high-performance computing to replace the on-premises supercomputer.

The migration was surprisingly transparent to users. “We migrated a huge datacenter to the cloud, which is an impressive feat in itself,” says Andersen. “But what’s even more impressive is that we shifted from on-premises to the cloud without our internal customers even knowing it.”

Vestas appreciated the assistance Microsoft provided. “We received extremely strong support with all phases of the migration, from planning through execution,” says Andersen. “The Microsoft team shared knowledge and best practices, helped us avoid pitfalls and pain points, and provided expert assistance when we did stumble and needed help.”

A key to success was the ability to blend the Microsoft solution into a complicated IT ecosystem. “Microsoft has unparalleled capability to ensure proper interoperation between Azure high-performance computing and our many existing systems and applications,” Enevoldsen says. “I’ve never witnessed anyone else as good at this—taking us by the hand and making sure that all parts work properly together and that we have the proper change management in place.”

Contributing to the success of the project are the plug-and-play opportunities that Azure provides for interconnecting with older tools, of which Vestas has many. The company has also been impressed by the reliability and financial transparency that Azure provides. “Azure is really transparent, with great reporting in terms of consumption and cost,” says Enevoldsen. “It is helping our engineers factor cost and value into their work while at the same time promoting innovation.”

Vestas has found that uptime of Azure high-performance computing has been excellent, and working with Azure gives the company access to the latest virtual machines, advanced networking gear, and GPU instances. Vestas can turn computing power on and off as needed and scale to accommodate even the most advanced geospatial simulations. This has made it possible to increase the value of the company’s climate assets by expanding simulations and re-simulating decades of global climate data at unprecedented high resolution.

A greener world for everyone

Sustainability is the foundation of Vestas’s strategy, and the migration to Azure high-performance computing is boosting the company’s sustainability efforts. Working in Azure, Vestas can assign jobs to compute in Azure regions that are operating on green energy when they’re available and appropriate for a given job’s business priority. “How can you claim you’re saving the world if you don’t do everything you can to limit your own carbon footprint?” asks Enevoldsen. “Increasingly, our customers are looking for data on green footprints and budgets—it’s become a prerequisite to operate in our business—and Azure is helping us excel in that area.” 

Having Vestas Climate Library in the cloud is also opening new business opportunities. “We are looking at taking Vestas Climate Library externally to clients outside the company,” says Enevoldsen. “That would have been complicated with our on-premises setup. It opens a wide range of business opportunities to develop new services based on our comprehensive climate library.”

Vestas is also looking forward to ways Azure AI services will enhance the company’s work. “AI isn’t going to replace our engineers, but it’s going to enhance their ability to do their jobs,” says Enevoldsen. ”We have an increasing amount of data and an increasing number of simulations, and we’re going to need AI to make sense of all that complexity and drive innovation forward.”

Ultimately, using Azure high-performance computing instead of the on-premises supercomputer is helping Vestas achieve its goal of creating value for the company and its customers while promoting sustainable energy around the world. “Now that we’re in Azure, we no longer need to prioritize maintenance of our compute services,” says Enevoldsen. “We can focus entirely on product and service development to deliver the best possible sustainable energy solutions to our growing customer base.”

That reduction benefits not just Vestas and its customers, but the whole planet. “We really want to make the Earth a better place to live and leave it greener for future generations,” says Andersen. “I strongly believe that with the Azure cloud platform and Azure high-performance computing, we are moving into a new era where we can serve our customers better and create a more sustainable world for everyone.”

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