British multinational mining company Anglo American (LON: AAL) has unveiled plans to consolidate operations at two of its mining data centres in Brazil into a single hyper-convergence environment provided by US company Dell (NYSE: DELL).

The two facilities are located close to the Conceição da Mata Dentro iron ore mine, in the Minas Gerais state, and in the port of São João da Barra, in Rio de Janeiro.

The data centres are used to monitor the entire mining production system and process laboratory data about the ore’s compliance with customer specifications. 

The consolidation project – which took eight months to be completed -was developed by Dell in partnership with local IT consultancy Portnet.

Anglo American said in a statement that it was looking for an environment that could handle heterogeneous processing periods – with peaks and low demand – and unify management of data centre components.

The project consolidated servers, storage systems and switches, unifying management under the concept of hyper-convergence with Dell’s EMC VxRail solution, which has consequently become the foundation of Anglo American’s private cloud.

Anglo American Brasil’s industrial IT coordinator Clebecy Santana, said: “These two data centres are extremely critical, receiving and processing data produced along the entire iron ore extraction chain, from the pressure of the pumps, volume in the ore pipelines, to the lifecycle of the equipment and trucks and to, finally, details of the delivery of the ore at the port.  

“Applications running in these data centres perform predictive analysis and generate alerts in case of possible problems.”