Nottingham Trent University (NTU) hopes to cut its data center carbon emissions in half with a £1.7 million data center upgrade carried out by Logicalis.

The hybrid cloud upgrade was procured through a framework agreement run by Janet (the Joint Academic Network) to offer more flexible services which NTU hopes will cut its data center carbon emissions almost in half (48 percent) by 2020.

NTU and Logicalis are replacing outdated IT equipment, reducing the cabinets in the onsite data center from nine down to three, which will cut costs and help the university to meet its carbon emissions reduction goals.

NTU infrastructure services manager Amanda Ferguson said with fewer servers the university was looking at a 40% reduction in power consumption and cooling: “We’ve spent less than half of the 2009 refresh on this new infrastructure approach, and we’re getting far more for the money,” she said.

Upgrading to the cloud
The university's data center equipment is spread across two sites and was last updated in 2009. This time round, Ferguson wanted flexibility and 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.”

NTU opted to go through the Janet Cloud and Data Centre Framework, a procurement agreement which links academic bodies with commercial suppliers, and chose to partner with Logicalis - the first commercial supplier to connect directly into JANET.

The pre-tendered framework cut the procurment process from 14 months to just six, said Ferguson - but it also helped that NTU had worked with Logicalis before.

The project is nearing completion and the next stage will see the installation of peer persistence on the storage array.

“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,” Ferguson said.