Like many academic institutions, the University of Plymouth has had to become more business-like
to maximise its intake of students and its financial resources.

A major component is ensuring the datacentre and its staff are able to offer fast, efficient, flexible IT services to the university’s 30,000 students and its 3,000 staff. In Plymouth’s case, such efficiency has meant consolidating and virtualising 280 ageing servers down to just 30 HP blades.

Infrastructure and operations manager Adrian Jane says the university is moving from being a fairly monolithic organisation, where things are undertaken relatively slowly, to a much more business-oriented model, where processes can be changed in a fairly short timeframe and adequately supported. “Having a monolithic server infrastructure underpinning that model would have held the university back,” he says.

Plymouth began the implementation in August and is now just a few months from completion. As before, the datacentre runs all central services ­ email, file storage, a SharePoint portal service, a managed learning environment for the students, plus financial, administrative and infrastructure management systems.

“What has changed is we are now also able to offer departments and research groups the ability to rent virtual servers and storage very flexibly ­ in effect acting as an internal ISP for our departments and research groups,” says Jane.

But he says the drive for efficiency and flexibility was not primarily about cost savings. “The consolidation was not done to save money,” he says. “If anything, we are spending more money on IT now than we were before. The main driver was to enable the university to do much more than it used to be able to.”

In terms of skills, Jane says the new technology has meant much less time spent keeping the lights on. “The servers have much better central management functionality, which means we are no longer running round visiting lots of servers,” he says.

Datacentre staff have instead become more business-focused to meet the demand for flexible IT services.

“We are, in effect, taking a utility computing approach,” says Jane. “Someone might need a server and storage for a few months to try something out. So they are looking to us to give them support ­ and that is not just providing servers and disk space, but setting the thing up, getting it working, helping users to optimise it, then potentially evaluating it with them to see if it is suitable for widescale implementation.”

Jane says the IT organisation is being encouraged to become more involved with Plymouth’s research groups and users, rather than just being an ivory tower organisation with no connection to the business.

“We have also had to become much more process-oriented,” says Jane ­ a transition that staff have found easier than in the case of many private sector firms.

“Because of the type of staff we employ and the environment we have, we tend to be more collaborative,” he says. “We tend to have much closer links with our networking team, our applications team and our web team, because that is how we work in academia.”