• • • COVER STORY • • •
Loughborough University Drives IT and Data Centre Efficiency with Schneider Electric
Loughborough, one of the UK’s leading universities, has worked with Schneider Electric and its Elite Partners, On365, to ensure operational continuity for the university’s data centre and distributed IT environments
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y modernising its infrastructure with the latest in resilient and energy efficient technologies and harnessing the power of data analytics and predictive maintenance, the university has futureproofed its campus to support its excellent research and academic reputation. With an attending student body of 19,500 across its 523-acre campus, Loughborough is one of the UK’s leading universities, with an international reputation for research that matters, excellence in teaching, strong links with industry, and unrivalled achievement in sport and its underpinning academic disciplines. Today, it is ranked world number one for sports-related subjects, Loughborough was also named Sports University of the Year in 2022 by The Times and Sunday Times.
IT is fundamental to the university, from its high-performance computing (HPC) servers, which support analytical research projects, to a highly virtualised data centre environment that provisions critical applications including finance, administration, and security. A primary example of this is the fire alarm system, which is mobilised by its data centre; any downtime would require a team to undertake continuous physical checks of all the university buildings – a tall order on such an extensive campus.
IT also provides the student community with digital access to course materials, the ability to take exams online and the provision of internet services to campus halls of residence. At the same time, Loughborough’s IT department offers a range of services to support the intensive commercial research being undertaken at the university. “We pride ourselves on the quality of our students’ experience,” said Mark Newall, Senior IT Specialist at the University. “And one of the things that students really rely on is good IT infrastructure. We also want the research groups to be confident that their systems will be available exactly to their research requirements.”
70 years of data centre evolution Established in 1909, today Loughborough University has two primary data centres that act as a failover to one another; its older Haslegrave site, constructed in the 1950s, and a newer facility named Holywell Park, which became operational in 2010.
When Mark Newall first became part of the IT team at Loughborough, the Haslegrave data centre hosted around 60 server racks. Layout had evolved
over the years, with different faculties adding new racks on an ad-hoc basis. Challenges surfaced gradually as the dynamics of the server load developed, with hotspots emerging when the room’s cooling units were unable to deliver sufficient cool air.
When the University virtualised its server load, the resulting reduction in the number of IT racks meant redesigning the Haslegrave’s data centre layout.
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“At the foundational level of everything which is data-driven
at the university, the Haslegrave and Holywell data centres are the power behind a host of advancements in sports science, and our transition towards a more sustainable university operation. Working with Schneider Electric and on365 has enabled our data centre to become more efficient, effective and operate
with more resilience.” Mark Newall
Senior IT specialist, Loughborough University ”
Mark Newall said: “Because my first degree is in thermodynamics and fluid mechanics, I had a good understanding of the complexity of airflows and so cooling design became my responsibility. It was clear to me that to optimise the data centres cooling efficiency, it was vital to segregate the air supplies.” Tasked with recommending a solution, Newall researched the available options and after a rigorous due diligence process, Loughborough became an early adopter of Schneider Electric’s Hot Aisle Containment Solution (HACS) (formerly InfraStruxure) – now known as its EcoStruxure Row Data Center.
Schneider Electric EcoStruxure Row Data Centers are pre-engineered, modular, scalable and highly-configurable systems, which include integrated power, racks, cooling and management software. Its use enables organisations like Loughborough to reduce install time, decrease risk and drive data centre efficiency.
8 ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING • NOVEMBER 2023
Mr Newall said: “We stopped cooling the room and focussed on directly cooling the racks and IT equipment. Containment enabled us to upgrade a data centre designed in the 50s and make it a suitable environment for a new generation of more compact and powerful servers.” Subsequently, the solution was also deployed in the new Holywell Park facility. He continued: “The EcoStruxure Row Data Centers - or Pods as we call them at Loughborough, immediately gave us a more structured and efficient data centre design, helping us to make better use of space, and enabling us to improve cooling, for more reliable IT services. A secondary advantage is that it gave us more control over the cooling.”
New challenges brought on
by a decade of use Fast forward more than ten years, and with the containment system approaching the end of its useful operating life, there was a requirement to refresh the university’s entire physical infrastructure. It was decided this could also be used as an inflection point to make other significant upgrades. The raised floor, which had been installed when the Haslegrave facility was originally built, had become unstable in places, and to ensure the safety of IT and services personnel, the decision was made to replace the floor, creating a new challenge to do so with no break in IT operations. The team at Loughborough had also designed the infrastructure to have no single point of failure - a design feature which extends to both the Haslegrave and Holywell Park data centres.
Solution – EcoStruxure for
data centres Working with on365, an Elite Partner to Schneider Electric, and specialist in providing energy efficient, physical IT infrastructure services for public sector, SME and corporate clients, the upgrade project was undertaken in two phases. Firstly by moving the IT so the floor could be upgraded in the first half of the facility, followed by the installation of the new EcoStruxure Row Data Center; and secondly, migrating the IT back into that new installation to address the second half of the floor. At the same time, more floor space in the data centre was created for future IT deployments.
electricalengineeringmagazine.co.uk
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