• • • COVER STORY • • • RMD and Schneider Electric add an Edge
to Education at University of Lincoln Established around 25 years ago, the University of Lincoln is one of the newest centres of academia in the UK
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harged with enriching the city’s economic, social and cultural life, the university has been adding new buildings to its city-centre campus at a rate of around one per year since its inception. Listed in the world’s top 130 in the Times Higher Education’s (THE) Young University Rankings 2022, today it is also one of the top universities for student satisfaction.
The main university campus is situated in one of the world’s great historic cities, in the heart of the city of Lincoln. Today, Lincoln is a winning combination of old meets new, where remnants of Roman Britain, a Norman castle and the Cathedral Quarter lay alongside a vibrant city square and the contemporary architecture of the university’s campus buildings, providing both student accommodation and housing for its Arts, Science, and Social Science colleges, as well as an International Business School and Medical School. To date, the university has constructed or acquired 25 buildings at a rate of approximately one per year, recently opening a substantial new student village. In terms of its significance to the local economy, out of every five people you might stop in the streets of Lincoln City, one is likely to be studying at the university, where just under two hundred different courses are offered (independent numbers suggest 18,000 students of a total 103,000 urban population).
As an academic institution that has more or less been conceived and grown up in the Internet Age, its student population is tech-literate, and the university depends heavily on IT to support the many faces of college life. For example, the campus has become largely cashless in recent years. “You can’t buy a cup of coffee or a sandwich if the IT isn’t working,” says Darran Coy, senior infrastructure analyst and team leader for the Compute and Storage team at the university. “Everything has to work 24 x 7.” With IT and network uptime critical for the function of the university, the university’s IT team supports a variety of services, some of which require large amounts of data storage and processing. For instance, at Lincoln Agri-Robotics (LAR), established at Lincoln University as the world’s first global centre of excellence in agricultural robotics, lightweight robotic vehicles are sent into fields for a variety of tasks, using image recognition in applications from the identification and eradication of pests and diseases in real time without synthetic pesticides, to monitoring, weeding and harvesting crops. Elsewhere, Darran Coy says many of the standard applications used by students and the university itself have moved to a Software as a Service (SaaS) or cloud-based delivery model. Accordingly, downtime is a luxury the university
simply cannot afford. “In times past we could arrange to shut down IT systems on, say, a Thursday morning to carry out essential maintenance and upgrades, and of course our weekends were completely free,” he says. “But today many of our buildings are open all day and every day. So we have to make sure that everything is up and running all the time.”
The Challenge of Reliability
at the Edge “We open a new building nearly every year,” says Darran Coy, “and each one needs its own comms room. Despite the fact that we operate a central data centre, each comms room is populated with IT racks, including servers and networking equipment, together with all the necessary supporting infrastructure, including cooling, structured cabling, power distribution (PDUs) and power protection. It is the epitome of edge computing.”
These edge environments, distributed across the city centre campus and satellite campuses at Riseholme and Holbeach, provide wi-fi connectivity, enabling access to SaaS applications required by students and staff. These edge facilities are, therefore, mission-critical to academic and back-office operations. Each person has a unique IP address, allowing them, e.g., to print documents and materials. Even those studying traditional subjects like Geography and Music use as much technology as the Computer Scientists, according to Coy. “We have something like 1000 teaching groups that rely on AV, for example – they’ve got big screens, sound systems and digital projectors, all kinds of cool stuff to enliven lectures and make information more consumable.” The university is also a major user of Power over Ethernet (PoE). “All of our access points use PoE,” continues Darran Coy. “And it’s also used to power other assets such as Raspberry Pi operated digital information displays widely used around the campus and security cameras. PoE requirements increase the need for reliable power in all situations.” Like many universities, Lincoln works with outside companies on research projects as well as providing incubation services for innovations which may have wider market appeal. These sorts of activities are income-generating for Lincoln, and therefore, the IT which supports them needs to be robust and demonstrably resilient. Power reliability is, therefore, a major challenge for the university. Given its location in the city centre, the utility is generally dependable, and since prolonged power blackouts are not seen as a major threat, there is no provision for secondary
power generation to any of the university facilities. However, intermittent disruptions do occur to the main power supply, and there are occasional ‘brownouts.’ Taken together, these are recurring problems which could present a threat to continuous uptime. Consequently, the university depends heavily on uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems to build resilience into its network. UPS systems provide battery backup in the event of a disruption to mains power so that essential functions can continue operating as normal until mains power is restored. Given the distributed nature of the edge IT infrastructure around the college, there has been a substantial wide variety of UPS systems in place. Currently, there are 110 APC Smart-UPS systems from Schneider Electric providing backup to essential assets. Given the lack of power-generating equipment at the university, UPS is specified with battery systems to deliver one hour’s runtime for the attached load. It had been the custom to add UPS support on an ad hoc basis as new buildings were built and fitted out with IT. In the early days, there was no systematic or co-ordinated approach to deploying UPS systems and in fact it was only the loss of expensive IT equipment in the early days which made their use standard. “The distributed edge nature of the university’s IT infrastructure in the university and the ongoing expansion with new buildings, together with the growth in dependence upon SaaS and cloud services, has sometimes meant that infrastructure has not always kept up with demand. We faced two tasks – the need to maintain and upgrade existing UPS systems to ensure they could deliver the required runtime and the need to meet the provision of new Schneider Electric UPS and installation services in new construction projects. To help us, we partnered with RMD UK.”
RMD and Schneider Electric are
the Solutions for Reliable Edge Darran Coy and team began their relationship with RMD UK over a decade ago when the Schneider Electric Elite partner won a tender for the replacement of some aging APC Smart-UPS On- Line SRT units on site. Soon after, the university took the step to implement a programme to ensure regular inspection and maintenance of the UPS devices on which it is so dependent. “In many respects, Schneider Electric is a victim of its own success – the UPS were so reliable and worked so well we hadn’t really realised that many of them were well past their use-by date!”
Opting for a systematic approach to securing power by contracting with a specialist UPS service
10 ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING • SEPTEMBER 2024
electricalengineeringmagazine.co.uk
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