Nottingham Trent’s Data Centre To Reduce Carbon Emissions

Nottingham Trent University (NTU) has begun work on refreshing its datacentre, aiming to enable a hybrid IT cloud approach, provide high-availability services to student and hit environmental targets.

The £1.7m refresh project is being handled by international IT solutions provided Logicalis and was procured via JANET – the Joint Academic Network.

The university is hoping for a 48% carbon reduction by 2020, as well as an agile IT infrastructure and hopes this programme will help it achieve these goals.

“We last invested in refreshing the datacentre facility, that’s spread across two sites, in 2009,” explained Amanda Ferguson, infrastructure services manager at NTU.

“Five years on, when discussion started around updating, we knew we wanted the means to gain greater flexibility as well as efficiency.

“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 added.

Onsite Facility To Be Downsized

Logicalis claims it will be reducing cabinets in the onsite datacentre facility from nine to just three, providing considerable savings for the university on capital expenditure, as well as putting it on track to reach carbon emission reduction goals.

“Just with fewer servers we’re looking at a 40% reduction in power consumption and cooling. More than that, we’ve spent less than half of the 2009 refresh on this new infrastructure approach and we’re getting far more for the money,” claimed Ferguson.

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