IBM has announced that it has won a contract with Hertford Regional College (HRC) to overhaul its IT infrastructure to save £300,000 a year and reduce its carbon footprint by 860 tonnes over the next three years.
The new network is set to go live when the new academic year begins in September. As well as the cost and environment impact of the new infrastructure, it will also provide the College with increased network speeds of ten gigabits per second. The will enable HRC to use high quality video content and CCTV.
To facilitate the improved infrastructure, HRC will be switching from HP servers to IBM blade server technology. When added to the virtualisation of servers and data storage, it is estimated that the new platform will use 20% of the power of its predecessor.
Virtualisation technology should also boost server utilisation from around 10% to over 70%.
“We have a responsibility to provide the highest quality service to our students and we believe this program delivers on that promise,” said Andy Forbes, Principal of Hertford Regional College. “We are very excited that we will be offering the fastest-in-class network for any college in Europe which will enable the continued introduction of dynamic services for learners and lecturers.”
The new platform features two IBM BladeCenters with 28 IBM blade servers and four iSCSI Storage Area Networks (SANs) at the College’s campuses in Ware and Broxbourne. The College can now manage the system from a single control point and budget, plan and control the power usage in its network operations centre. This includes scheduling downtime during quiet periods to minimise disruption to students.
The cost savings and carbon footprint reduction will be through switching to air conditioned cooling and an automatic switch off of the blade servers when they are not in use.
The College will also be receiving a new disaster recovery programme, enabling it to reduce downtime from hours or days to minutes, and fault tolerance and load balancing capabilities to make the network more robust.
Day-to-day maintenance will also be reduced with the introduction of virtualised desktops and new applications should be provisioned within hours rather than days or weeks.
