Research in the UK has received a boost with the creation of a data center to support academic research. It’s the first shared data center for medical and academic research in the UK and will be a world leading research facility.

But sharing can be fraught with problems. The project only went ahead under the proviso that all the customers can get what they want - different reliability Tiers, and different power levels - while still locating them in the same hall.

Jisc, the public body providing technology for higher education, set the project up, and the work was contracted by Janet, the UK’s national research and education network. The five-year contract to build the center was won by specialist data center provider Infinity, and the data center has already won Datacenter Dynamics EMEA awards for design and innovation. 

More efficiency

For some time, Janet had been looking for ways to increase the efficiency of the IT infrastructure supporting universities and thereby reducing cost. The team knew that a shared data centre would achieve this, and bring other benefits by providing a neutral space to install and share services, facilitating collaboration between universities and other research institutions, and improving the results of major research projects.

The shared data center would also free up space in universities, bringing further cost savings.

With £900,000 of government funding available from the University Modernisation Fund (UMF), a group of anchor customers got together, including University College London (UCL), Kings College London, The Sanger Institute, The Francis Crick Institute, The London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE) and Queen Mary University of London (QMUL).

Janet and its university partners ran a tender process to select a data center provider for the world’s first shared university data center facility.

Stiff requirements

The project’s requirements stated that the data center had to be operationally efficient, helping the anchor customers to reduce their carbon footprint and cut energy consumption.

With a group of users sharing the space, the provider would have to provide a range of power densities from 4kW to 30kW per rack, within the same hall. Janet also asked for the ability to flexibly change the power provision to the rack, quickly catering for periods of high power demand if required by the partners.

This requirement was particularly needed by those working on biomedical research and needing high-performance computing (HPC). Most of the customers needed racks that can handle peaks of up to 30kW of power, and current current university facilities were falling behind.

“For the majority of our anchor customers, power flexibility was very important as most work on biomedical research takes a lot of processing power,” said Jeremy Sharp, head of strategic technologies at Janet.

Janet also needed to offer different levels of resilience to match the varying types of application from regular business IT to research projects. Janet specified resilience levels from a Tier I single feed, single power feed platform, with and without an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS), to a traditional concurrently maintainable Tier III platform.

Location demands

The final major consideration was location. All anchor customers required the data center facility to be based in the UK and within four hours’ travel, so they could carry out routine maintenance without high travel costs. As the universities handle NHS data, it was an absolute requirement that the data center be UK based to comply with the Data Protection Act.

Janet chose Infinity SDC because it could meet these requirements for flexibility, said Sharp: “We felt that Infinity’s willingness to create a flexible, scalable, partnership was essential to meet Jisc’s current and future requirements.”

Infinity’s Slough center, which opened in January 2014, is modern and flexible, and its central location fit the bill - as well allowing enough connectivity for the customers.

The move to the new site went quickly and smoothly, and with anchor customers in place, Janet is promoting the data center to over 140 universities and research institutions: “This is the first step to increasing collaboration between more universities and colleges,” says Sharp. “Smaller universities and colleges find it difficult to afford their own data centre facilities; this will provide to access the same level of technology as the larger universities, without the large overheads that go with it.”

While the new center frees up real estate at Universities, Infinity CEO Stuart Sutton (pictured) is emphatic that his business in Slough is not about the property either:  “The outsourced data center market is no longer a place for property transactions – it requires flexible, scalable, partnerships that delivers an important component to the customer’s overall IT solution.” 

Universities shifting to the new data center will be able to free up data center space, and turn it into valuable teaching, learning and laboratory space. Their staff will also be able to dedicate more time to core activities.

Janet expects new partners will embrace the concept of a shared data center and this will increase the opportunities for collaboration, creating an ecosystem encompassing not just academia and research institutions but commercial ventures that need access to research data. As more organizations use the data center, they will benefit from lower costs via aggregation.

This shared data center is also a significant step towards Janet’s vision of helping research and education institutions on the journey to cloud services. Janet provides guidance and facilitates the procurement of cloud services through its Cloud and Data Centre Framework.