CASE STUDY u SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC
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.
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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.
INTRODUCTION: DATA CENTRES AT IRELAND’S LARGEST UNIVERSITY University 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, UCD’s enterprise architecture manager, 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 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.
28 June 2023 Irish Manufacturing
www.irish-manufacturing.com
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