University of St Andrews consolidates and virtualises 400 servers in 50 locations

Project led by CIO Steven Watt intended to cut costs, power consumption and carbon emissions at the 600-year-old University

The University of St Andrews, one of the oldest universities in the world, has slashed its power bills and carbon emissions with a radical process of server consolidation and virtualisation.

The project, which is ongoing, involved consolidating some 400 servers distributed in 50 locations across the University's 166-building estate across the town into just two data centres.

It was instigated in 2010 when Steven Watt was appointed CIO at the University. Such was the sprawling nature of its IT estate Watt had to conduct a thorough audit of equipment, its location, and the services they provide first before embarking on the project.

"We had a lot of servers and services distributed across the town, and the rationality was to locate these in many fewer locations and to make them more energy efficient," said Watt.

"The first stage was, in effect, to identify what we had and where it was located. The second stage, using the information we'd gathered, was to design a data centre to accommodate the bulk of the equipment that we knew we had distributed across town.

"The data centre was then constructed - that took about a year, in terms of the construction phase, and getting it ready to be populated. Thereafter, the equipment was re-located from those 50 sites down to just two locations," he added.

As part of this process, the applications on some 55 existing Unix servers were consolidated onto just three Oracle T4-4 Sparc-based Unix servers, while the Windows-based machines were virtualised under VMWare, email outsourced to Google, and the Microsoft Exchange environment outsourced to BrightSolid.

A Dell Compellent storage area network (SAN) was also installed, with data replicated on a separate site for back-up and resilience.

The data centre itself was housed in a old squash court owned by the University with a plant room constructed next to it to house cooling and back-up equipment.

At the same time, the University has also installed some 1,200 wireless access points to support bring your own device (BYOD) by both students and staff, and upgraded its links to the SuperJANET backbone network dedicated to higher education in the UK.

"Students are now turning up with three, four or five devices and a lot more staff are using tablets, too," said Steven Watt, CIO at the University of St Andrews.

Partly on the back of that transformation, Watt was voted ICT Leader of the Year at the 2013 Holyrood Connect ICT Awards.

Computing will be talking in-depth to University of St Andrews' CIO Steven Watt in the next issue. Subscription is free to IT professionals. To subscribe to Computing, please click here.

To subscribe to our email newsletter, please click here.

To hear Steven Watt's story, register to attend the forthcoming Computing Data Centre Summit, 24 September, which will also feature speakers from Facebook, Morgan Stanley, BT and the BBC.