28
CASE STUDY
University
challenge
By Schneider Electric
www.schneider-electric.co.uk
Sheffield Hallam boosts IT
efficiency with Schneider Electric
data centre and DCIM software
Working with Advanced Power Technology (APT), a partner
to Schneider Electric and specialist in data centre design,
build and maintenance, Sheffield Hallam University
has undertaken work to deploy a state-of-the art highly
virtualised data centre as part of a £30m building
development at Charles Street in central Sheffield.
APT’s installation is based on Schneider Electric
InfraStruxure integrated data centre physical infrastructure
solution for power, cooling and racking. The new facility is
managed using StruxureWare for Data Centers DCIM (Data
Centre Infrastructure Management) software to maximise
the efficiency of data centre operations.
IT Services at Sheffield Hallam
Sheffield Hallam University is situated on two campuses
comprising 12 major buildings in the centre of the city of
Sheffield. Its IT department operates two data centres,
running as an active-active pair in which each location
provides primary IT services as well as offering failover
support to the other.
“Services provided by the IT department are typical of
those required by any university,” said Robin Jeeps, Project
Manager for Sheffield Hallam. “We host the website, the
intranets and common applications such as Exchange,
Outlook and Office, in addition to the student management
systems, virtual learning environments, library systems and
CRM (customer relationship management) systems.”
In terms of hardware, the university has adopted a
virtualisation policy, running between 800 and 900 Virtual
Machines on about 70 blade servers distributed across both
data centres. It also has a small high-performance Beowulf
compute cluster to support research projects but for the
most part the main concerns for the IT department are high
availability, reliability and cost.
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