University of Salford aims for shared student services with £5.7m datacentre upgrade

The University of Salford is spending £5.7m on a datacentre upgrade which will improve student access to shared applications, storage and virtual learning environments.

It hopes it can repay its investment by leasing IT resources to other academic institutions via shared cloud based services.

“I’d be looking at it as a revenue opportunity – a way to repay the big investment we have made here,” said Salford University CIO Derek Drury.

“There is an opportunity for a lot of people looking at disaster recovery and failover sites, as well as additional storage and hosted applications.”

Salford hosts almost 20,000 students and 2,500 staff on its campus, with students also able to access facilities at the MediaCityUK development at Salford Quays.

Delivered under a 13-month contract with systems integrator Unisys, the upgrade has two objectives: to help the university cut ongoing costs by virtualising and centralising 360 servers and 164 customised applications, and to provide a second datacentre for disaster recovery purposes.

There were four content management system (CMS) and three customer relationship management system (CRM) applications in use, and Drury wanted to make sure everyone was using the same software.

Security is provided by Novell identity access management (IAM) tools and student email accounts are already hosted with an external cloud provider using the web-based Microsoft Live@Edu communication and collaboration platform.

“We went through a period of low investment in IT – the replacement cycles were very high and we ended up with 290 servers [in the datacentre] with another 70 under people’s desks in schools and other facilities,” said Drury.

“Now we have a bit of budget to spend, we have virtualised all of them and there is further rationalisation of applications. The second datacentre is a business continuity thing – the new one will be the main facility with plenty of space [for expansion] and the old one used for disaster recovery.”

Drury says the upgrade is long overdue, but that the lack of investment in Salford’s IT infrastructure was not down to lack of budget, but to the absence of any clear strategy for long-term improvement.

“There was not really a focus on what IT could do for the business,” he said.

The university is still mulling its options and negotiating the terms and conditions of a maintenance contract, said Drury.

Salford’s 95-strong IT department is handling implementation and management, with much of the existing EMC storage, Dell blade servers and Cisco networking kit covered by existing support contracts with individual suppliers.

Wide area network (WAN) links are provided by the JANET higher education network, Net North West and Virgin Media in the MediaCityUK development.

“One option is how much third-party support we need as we already have contracts with Cisco and other vendors. We may or may not decide to bunch all of it together,” said Drury.

The unusual 13-month contract duration was dictated by the strict time constraints around upgrade opportunities that apply to most universities.

“All academic institutions have requirements for IT upgrades to be finished by a specific time because they have massive hoards of students arriving. To be fair, it would not matter if it ran over as long as critical applications and platforms are done,” said Drury.

“We just put the contract out to tender and Unisys came in with what appeared to be a very sensible plan which works out well on time and budget targets.”