'Discovery to implementation' in 10 months as Imperial College chooses Infinity for colo

Off-site and into colocation in record time, Imperial is laying the template for its sector peers

Paul Jennings, head of ICT service operations at Imperial College London, is busy migrating the institution's on-site data centre to a co-location scheme with data centre provider Infinity.

"Both of our data centres were on the same campus, which clearly isn't ideal from a resilience and high availability perspective," admits Jennings.

"The college has been looking at the strategy for a couple of years, originally looking at other providers. We asked: could we build? Could we colo[cate]? What made sense from when I joined [Imperial, just over a year ago] was to look at colo, as we clearly couldn't continue to operate both data centres on campus."

"We didn't want to build a data centre - that decision was made early, as one of the key factors for us is agility," says Jennings.

"We have to ask to what scale we build and that was quite a challenge. Sixty per cent of the college is research and you can't always gauge the size of that, so we needed an agile approach. So it made sense for us to go with a colo provider, but keep managing the IT ourselves so that we have that resilience within the data centre."

Settling on the guidelines and framework laid down by the Jisc organisation, a body that "champions the use of digital technologies in UK education and research", a brief tendering process eventually led Jennings to Infinity.

"I benchmarked it on price, and it was attractive," says Jennings. "And from a distance perspective it makes sense when we're using the Slough facility."

Imperial has initially taken a 12-rack enclosure at Infinity, as well as N+1 redundancy for resilience in the event of component failure. "This makes sense for us," says Jennings.

Services will start to go live next week, meaning a "discovery to implementation" cycle of around 10 months for Imperial's colo project.

Jennings is also proud of how Imperial has managed to leverage existing assets when going colo, taking a previous investment in Cisco and IBM's VersaStack across to Infinity.

"The difference with us, though, is we're not using the Janet network to go across to Slough," reveals Jennings, referring to the government-funded high-speed network for education and research.

Instead, Imperial College is lucky enough, due to its central London location, to have access to a large amount of high-bandwidth dark fibre.

"We're dark fibre rich, and fortunate enough to have that bandwidth," he says, "and we're running that all the way to Slough."

The project, says Jennings, has "brought people together" from the IT department, not least because the infrastructure for the project has been designed in-house.

Of the 12-rack purchase, 30 per cent will remain free to begin with, but talks are already ongoing with Infinity for expansion.

But Jennings is keen to point out that only enterprise IT is going over to Infinity for now, with high-performance compute staying on-premise for now. This, he feels, is unusual compared to the typical trend with educational institutions.

Jennings admits that, in terms of further plans, the new data centre Infinity is putting together in Stratford, as Computing discussed with Coreix recently, holds an attraction, with other universities already contacting Jennings to discuss such tactics and plunder him for secrets of his infrastructural planning and design. But he enjoys the collaborative spirit.

"The education sector has got its challenges, but we're on a journey of change. And I like change," says Jennings.

To find out more about Jennings' story as an end user and talk about it with him in person at his exclusive presentation, sign up for Computing's Data Centre and Infrastructure Summit on 23 September 2015.

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