ULCC spends £3 million on new data centre

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The University of London Computer Centre (ULCC), which powers some of the biggest institutions in the capital, has spent £3 million on upgrading the infrastructure in its data centre.

The new facility in Russell Square, Central London measures 750 m2 and has focused on increasing its uptime and resilience. As well as standby generators, it has fail-safe air conditioning and argonite fire suppression equipment, which is considered the green option.

It took 18 months to move the data centre from its own home on Guildford Street where it had sat for over 40 years, but the teams involved managed to do this with only one hour of downtime.

With networking provided by Brocade, the data centre also now features a BigIron RX-16 series 10 Gbps backbone switch platform and a ServerIron 4Gbps switch to improve performance and traffic management.

Colin Love, ULCC’s data centre manager, said in a statement: “Given our funding cycle, our core backbone networking equipment has to last for at least five years.”

He added: “While we don’t need 10Gbps capacity quite yet, we didn’t want to buy a switch for Stewart House now which doesn’t support it, only to have to replace it when the faster speed is required in two or three years’ time.”

In addition to networking capabilities, ULCC has also updated its servers and storage array network and replaced its existing tape libraries at a cost of £1 million.

Running VMware, it has also taken on virtualisation enthusiastically with 30 virtual machines running alongside its 120 physical ones.

Places that will benefit from the new data centre include Kings College, the British Library and City University.

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