Loughborough University is to deploy Logicalis’ Cooperative Cloud to cost-effectively meet the long-term capacity demands of its growing research, teaching and enterprise services.
As part of a strategic IT partnership, Logicalis will design and build an on-site, bespoke private cloud fully integrated with an off-site, cooperative hosted cloud. This single, scalable architecture will provide unlimited scope for future capacity provisioning and is set to save the University over 640 metric tonnes of CO² per annum and significant cost-savings.
Dr Phil Richards, Director of IT at Loughborough University, comments, “Our data centre was built and designed 40 years ago. It has served us well, but is showing its age through a poor PUE (Power Utilisation Efficiency) rating and limited capacity. We were open to innovation from the IT sector to bring us the most cost-effective and creative ways to build a more holistic and scalable IT architecture that would grow with us for the long-term.
‘Precise capacity planning more than a couple of years in advance is nigh-on impossible in our sector. While other education establishments are investing millions in new data centre builds to increase capacity and efficiency, it became clear during the tender process that a cloud model would provide the most strategic option for Loughborough both now, and into the future.”
According to Richards, in assessing a range of private and hybrid cloud services, Logicalis stood out for its compelling credentials in developing public sector services coupled with a uniquely tangible cloud; “I was able to visit the data centre and see the Logicalis Cooperative Cloud in action. No other provider was able to make the cloud real in this way, which was an important ingredient for us to assess the service capability and risk to our business. Logicalis’ connection to JANET was also a key differentiator - it was clear they had made significant commercial investment into their cloud infrastructure so we wouldn’t have to.”
Loughborough’s on-site cloud is built on enterprise class technology from Cisco, NetApp and CA to create a self-contained, highly virtualised and extremely compact environment. This provides enough compute, storage and network capacity to meet immediate local demand, while long-term future capacity, on-demand burst capacity and disaster recovery capability is provided by the Logicalis Hosted Cloud.
Simon Daykin, CTO of Logicalis UK, explains, “We have been able to leverage the innovation of our private cloud design and hosted cloud services to transform the future of server and storage provisioning at the University. The Logicalis Virtual Container technology allows Loughborough to move real IT services back and forth between on-site dedicated and off-site shared hosted clouds rapidly, reliably and without application or infrastructure changes.
