New infrastructure to reduce downtime and improve efficiency

University Campus Suffolk (UCS) has enlisted the help of Fujitsu to create a virtualised data centre infrastructure to support the majority of the institution’s systems. This will provide a cost-effective, flexible approach to application and computing resource deployment and management, enabling a more customer friendly approach to planned maintenance.

The project consists of two phases: transition from an unreliable and unmanageable legacy physical server and first generation virtualisation environment to deployment of Fujitsu’s vShape “infrastructure-in-a-box” technology; followed by an expansion of UCS’s storage infrastructure.
The project will solve a number of challenges for UCS which has grown rapidly over recent years putting pressure on its IT systems. For instance application updates had to be handled manually during office hours leading to regular downtime; maintenance of physical servers took place monthly on a Friday night involving extensive planning and discussions with multiple departments and UCS staff to minimise impact on the institution’s operations; and late nights for the IT Services (ITS) team, who had to patch the physical servers, install updates and re-start the systems.

UCS is now ready to implement the Fujitsu vShape 100 ‘virtualisation infrastructure-in-a-box’ package. This will enable the rapid deployment of both applications and compute resource at the click of a button. Virtual machine applications and workloads can be moved to other virtual servers in the solution, keeping the applications running and removing the need for planned downtime. The customers of the UCS ITS team will not even know the infrastructures under their applications are being worked on; and ITS is looking forward to fewer late nights.

vShape’s High Availability option ensures uninterrupted uptime should a blade failure occur or a workload spike require a sudden increase in performance.

“UCS is a fast paced, rapidly expanding, modern higher education institution and we need to ensure that our core IT systems are capable of supporting, not inhibiting, the institution’s aspirations,” explains Peter O’Rourke, director of IT Services at UCS. “Improved reliability and performance of the core IT infrastructure allied to the benefits of virtualisation are near-term immediate gains but scope for future expansion is the real appeal of the Fujitsu approach.”

Craig Parker, head of product marketing at Fujitsu UK and Ireland’s Technology Product Group, said “Fujitsu vShape is designed from the ground up to offer the small to medium-sized business – whether that’s an office or a University – everything it needs to deliver highly flexible and expandable IT to its users. We have already proven that an innovative storage system can deliver benefits and we are confident that vShape will further help staff and students.”