• • • CASE STUDY • • •
Improved data centre resilience and efficiency is a cool outcome from Schneider Electric upgrade at UCD
The Future Campus project at University College Dublin called for space utilised by facility plant and equipment to be given up for development to support the student population. Total Power Solutions, an Elite Partner to Schneider Electric, worked with UCD’s IT Services organisation to upgrade its primary data centre cooling system, to provide greater resilience for its HPC operations whilst releasing valuable real estate
U
niversity College Dublin (UCD) is the largest university in Ireland, with a total student population of about 33,000. It is one of Europe’s leading research-intensive universities with faculties of medicine, engineering, and all major sciences as well as a broad range of humanities and other professional departments. The university’s IT infrastructure is essential to its successful operation, for academic, administration and research purposes. The main campus at Belfield, Dublin is served by two on- premises data centres that support all the IT needs of students, faculty and staff, including high- performance computing (HPC) clusters for computationally intensive research. The main data centre in the Daedalus building, hosts all the centralised IT including storage, virtual servers, Identity and Access Management, business systems, networking, and network connectivity in conjunction with a smaller on-premises data centre. Tom Cannon, enterprise architecture manager at UCD, said: “Security is a major priority , so we don’t want researchers having servers under their own desks. We like to keep all applications inside the data centre, both to safeguard against unauthorised access—as universities are desirable targets for hackers—and for ease of management and efficiency.”
Challenges: Ageing cooling infrastructure presents downtime threat and
reputational damage Resilience is a key priority for UCD’s IT services. Also, with its campus located close to Dublin’s city centre, real estate is at a premium. There are continuing demands for more student facilities and consequently the need to make more efficient use of space by support services such as IT. Finally, there is a pervasive need to maintain
services as cost-effectively as possible and to minimise environmental impact in keeping with a general commitment to sustainability. As part of a major strategic development of the university’s facilities called Future Campus, the
40 ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING • JULY/AUGUST 2023
electricalengineeringmagazine.co.uk
main Daedalus data centre was required to free up some outdoor space taken up by a mechanical plant and make it available for use by another department. The IT Services organisation took this opportunity to revise the data centre cooling architecture to make it more energy and space efficient as well as more resilient and scalable. “When the data centre was originally built, we had a large number of HPC clusters and consequently a high rack power density,” said Mr Cannon. “At the time we deployed a chilled-water cooling system as it was the best solution for such a load. However, as the technology of the IT equipment has advanced to provide higher processing capacity per server, the cooling requirement has reduced considerably even though the HPC clusters have greatly increased in computational power.”
One challenge with the chilled water system was that it relied upon a single set of pipes to supply the necessary coolant, which therefore
represented a single point of failure. Any issues encountered with the pipework, such as leaks, could therefore threaten the entire data centre with downtime.
This could create problems at any time in the calendar, however, were it to occur at critical moments such as during exams or registration it would have a big impact on the university community. Reputational damage, both internally and externally, would also be significant.
Solution: Migration to Schneider Electric Uniflair InRow DX Cooling Solution resolves reliability, scalability
and space constraints UCD IT services took the opportunity presented by the Future Campus project to replace the existing chilled water-based cooling system with a new solution utilising Schneider Electric’s Uniflair
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