END USER INSIGHT
Tom Cannon , Enterprise Architecture Manager at University College Dublin
IRELAND ’ S LARGEST UNIVERSITY UPGRADES DATA CENTRE COOLING SYSTEM WITH SCHNEIDER
The Future Campus project at
University College Dublin ( UCD ) 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 while releasing valuable real estate . Tom Cannon ,
Enterprise Architecture Manager at University College Dublin , discusses the project in further detail .
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 highperformance 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 .
“ Security is a major priority , so we don ’ t want researchers having servers under their own desks ,” said Tom Cannon , Enterprise Architecture Manager at University College Dublin . “ 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 www . intelligentdatacentres . com
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