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.