Nottingham Trent University has picked Logicalis to implement a hybrid cloud to support 28,000 students.

The £1.7m project will see the university reduce the size of its ageing data centre to adopt a mix of on-premise and cloud systems as it tries to deliver greener IT services that are more agile and efficient.

Following a rigorous bidding process, Nottingham Trent chose to partner with Logicalis, and the deal will see Logicalis aim to reduce the education establishment’s carbon emissions by 48% come 2020.

Logicalis has begun by cutting the number of cabinets in the data centre from nine to three, a process now nearing completion.

Amanda Ferguson, infrastructure services manager at the university, said: "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 [money spent on the] 2009 refresh on this new infrastructure approach, and we’re getting far more for the money."

That refresh five years ago targeted the data centre facility, spread across two sites, but the upgrades to equipment are already outdated as the university tries to meet the technology demands of its 28,000 students and 3,500 staff.

That is why the university is set on a hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Ferguson said: ""Student and user experience is paramount and as we innovate and evolve to meet growing technology expectations, there’s an ever increasing demand for capacity. The flexibility and elasticity this new infrastructure approach is our answer to achieving our goal of high performance where and when we need it.

"We want the ability to move data and workloads to the most appropriate place for delivery and performance at certain points during the year. We can keep business critical data on premise and then push other stuff out to the cloud as and when required."

The data centre reduction will be followed by installing peer persistence on the storage array, which Ferguson hopes is the final piece of the puzzle in achieving high availability.

"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.

Picture courtesy of Nottingham Trent University on Flickr