University opts for greener Logicalis datacentre

Cost-saving datacentre facility refresh begins for Nottingham Trent University

Logicalis UK has begun a £1.7m datacentre refresh at Nottingham Trent University tipped to slash the latter's carbon emissions 48 per cent by 2020.

Mark Starkey, managing director of Logicalis UK, said the solution provider is working closely with the university to deliver an agile datacentre environment that will comply with both short and long term strategic goals both short and long term.

"Having worked with the university on a number of projects over the last decade, we understand the pressures and requirements for delivering optimal services to an increasingly tech-demanding student and staff base," Starkey (pictured) said.

According to the Logicalis announcment, the deal was procured via the Joint Academic Network (JANET) and will promote a hybrid-cloud approach and high availability to support 28,000 students and 3,500 staff, while slashing carbon emissions by 48 per cent.

Amanda Ferguson, infrastructure services manager at Nottingham Trent University, said the institution had last invested in the two-site datacentre in 2009 and now wanted more flexibility as well as efficiency. Becoming greener was another imperative.

"We want the ability to move data and workloads to the most appropriate place for delivery and performance at certain points during the year. With this project, we're preparing for a hybrid cloud approach, where we can keep business critical data on premise and then push other stuff out to the cloud as and when required," she said.

Logicalis won the deal in a competitive tender and is the first commercial supplier to connect directly into JANET. The previous nine on-site datacentre cabinets will be reduced to three, not only saving capex but helping it meet its carbon emissions target.

Next, peer persistance will be deployed on the storage array.

"JANET's pre-tendered framework made finding the right supplier easy. Without it, it could have taken us around 14 months, but here we kicked off the selection process and placed our order within six," Ferguson added.

"As well as saving us time, we had worked with Logicalis in the past, and were confident that this project played to their strengths."

Just having fewer servers cuts power consumption and cooling needs by 40 per cent, and the refresh is turning out both to be cheaper than the 2009 project while delivering more for the money, Ferguson said.

"We will be able to push data out to the cloud quickly and easily. Being able to move servers around internally and externally depending on need in this way will create the optimal environment for us," she said.

"There's an ever increasing demand for capacity. The flexibility and elasticity of this new infrastructure approach is our answer to that."