Green ICT
Information Services is dedicated to environmentally sustainable computing and to improving the energy efficiency of data centres and computing systems throughout the University.
What we are doing
- Server Infrastructure - A major Server Virtualisation project is underway which will involve the migration of 100 physical servers into a virtual environment of three blade servers over the next year. This will result in carbon emissions savings in terms of server hardware within the University’s Data Centre environment. The environment will provide additional savings by ‘shutting’ services down and turning elements of hardware off when not needed.
- Central Data Centre Design - The new Data Centre in the McClay Library has many energy saving features, including ‘free air cooling’ which means that, rather than chilling the air within the Centre, fresh air which is already sub-21 degrees is used. In addition, hot air generated by our servers is removed from the Data Centre and used to heat the library building and provide the hot water supply.
- Client Side Equipment - Information Services works in partnership with the Purchasing Office to continually review equipment specification and ensure supplier compliance with all recent standards in terms of computing capability and the power efficiency of equipment. All equipment within the Student Computing Centres (SCC), which hold several hundred machines, is under four years old. An automated system shuts down equipment when the SCCs are not in use.