A data centre strategy for higher education

Evinact was engaged by a well-established and renowned university to develop a Data Centre Futures Hybrid Model where a combination of on-premise technologies and hosted technologies could be managed in a cohesive way.

The strategy enabled the customer to mitigate business continuity risks and meet compliance requirements by removing dependency on both data centres sited on the same campus, and to realise operational efficiencies and effectiveness through new, more agile approaches to provisioning enterprise ICT infrastructure.

In addition, the strategy identified how to take best advantage of the rapid growth of cloud and managed hosting services as a means to reduce infrastructure management requirements and to change the cost base of providing enterprise ICT from capital to operational.

Evinact delivered two primary outputs from this engagement:

• A hybrid data centre model (across facility, rack, network, storage, compute, operating system, information/data and application layers)
• An implementation roadmap.

 

The hybrid data centre model defined new infrastructure environment which blends on premise, hosted and ‘as a service’ solutions. However, it also recognised that there was not a single step from current to future, and detailed a transition state.

A deep understanding of the nature of the required changes across the technology environment was collated.

The implementation roadmap presented 77 specific actions across 13 thematic areas, indicative cost and complexity of each action, the associated critical path, key milestones, performance metrics and measures which set direction of the next 3-5 years of ICT investments at the university.

This engagement was originally completed as GWI.