Nottingham Trent University in England seeks to lower its carbon emissions by 48 percent by 2020, and at the same time, it wants to improve technological opportunities for staff and students through an updated IT infrastructure. This week, it announced that it has chosen Logicalis as its service provider that will install a hybrid cloud systems that will allow the university to become more agile and meet its goals.
Logicalis is currently using the Joint Academic Network (JANET) to deliver the hybrid cloud, and as a provider of such services, it went through an extensive bidding process with the university to claim the project. The cloud will support the activities of 3,500 university staff members and 28,000 students across three campuses. Even with that large size, Amanda Ferguson, infrastructure services manager at NTU, said selecting a supplier was easy with the JANET framework and that it helped that the university had worked with Logicalis in the past.
"JANET's pre-tendered framework made finding the right supplier easy," Ferguson said. "Without it, it could have taken us around 14 months, but here we kicked off the selection process and placed our order within just six! As well as saving us time, we had worked with Logicalis in the past, and were confident that this project played to their strengths as an organization."
She also explained that the university first invested in its data center facility, across two sites, in 2009. But it has been five years since that time, and soon NTU started talking about a complete upgrade of its system. Alongside its mission to lower its carbon footprint, it knew that improved performance was necessary and that hybrid cloud-based approach could provide what it needed.
"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," Ferguson continued.
With the conversion, NTU will end up with only three on-site data center cabinets. That is down from a previous nine cabinets, and that alone should save it money through decreased power consumption –a 40 percent reduction in power and heating overall. The project is reportedly underway and pressing toward completion. The last task NTU and Logicalis need to accomplish is installing peer persistence on its storage array, and that will allow it to begin moving data to and from its internal servers and its off-site cloud servers.
Edited by
Maurice Nagle
