DCN August 2016 | Page 39

projects & agreements University of Bristol joins Jisc’s shared facilities in Virtus’ data centre RED BULL RACING TEAMS UP WITH IBM SPECTRUM COMPUTING Red Bull Racing has announced a renewed agreement to team with IBM Spectrum Computing for a further four years, until 2020. The Red Bull Racing team uses IBM Spectrum solutions to manage the data used in the design and development of its 2016 challenger, the RB12. The newly extended Innovation Partner relationship is marked with IBM Spectrum Computing branding on-car and around the garage. The team uses IBM Spectrum solutions to automate mission critical development processes running on the factory’s high performance computing (HPC) cluster, enabling more efficient and effective use of the resource. Key to this is workload scheduler IBM Spectrum LSF, which acts like a project manager for this data, and IBM Spectrum Scale, a software defined storage tool designed to simplify and control large volumes of data. The renewed agreement will also add IBM’s Spectrum Protect functionality to the team’s IT arsenal; providing back up capability to secure the large volumes of data generated every day in the factory – and every weekend at the race track. Virtus Data Centres (Virtus) has announced the latest member of the first national shared data centre for research and education, offered by UK higher, further education and skills’ digital services and solutions organisation JiscRussellRussell.   The University of Bristol joins 16 education and research establishments already benefiting from the shared facility at Virtus’ London4. The university will use the data centre to host systems for business, teaching and research, including the next generation of BlueCrystal, its high performance computing facility. This is part of a 10 year strategy which will see the university shift the balance of its systems from on site to third party hosting. The easy to use shared data centre framework agreement provided by Virtus and Jisc enables the University of Bristol to take advantage of the state-ofthe-art, agile and flexible data centre ecosystem. It opens doors for increased collaboration for research projects and allows the 17 organisations to partner with each other to unlock innovations. Other benefits include reducing its carbon footprint and improving efficiency across core IT and on-premise data centre facilities that will also be used for teaching and other operational requirements.