Hertford Regional College selects IBM to save £300k and reduce carbon footprint

LONDON, UK - 20 Aug 2009: Hertford Regional College (HRC) announced today that it has chosen IBM (NYSE:IBM) to help re-design its IT infrastructure to deliver energy cost savings of around £300,000, and reduce its carbon footprint by 860 tonnes over the next three years. The new system, which is set to launch when the academic year begins in September will also provide increased network speeds of ten gigabits per second enabling the use of high quality video content and CCTV, making the environment a better and safer place for HRC’s 12,000 students and staff. 

The re-design sees HRC switch from HP servers to IBM blade server technology which, together with the virtualisation of servers and data storage, uses 20% of the power of its predecessor, is easier to maintain and has simplified management. Virtualisation will also boost utilisation rates for servers from around 10% to over 70%.

Commenting on the overall project, Andy Forbes, Principal of Hertford Regional College, said: “We have a responsibility to provide the highest quality service to our students and we believe this program delivers on that promise. We are very excited that we will be offering the fastest-in-class network for any college in Europe which will enable the continued introduction of dynamic services for learners and lecturers. The new solution will enable the College to excel in providing pioneering services to students. This is particularly important as their requirements and use of IT will continue to grow for the foreseeable future.”

The new system incorporates two IBM BladeCenters with 28 IBM blade servers and four iSCSI Storage Area Networks (SANs) across its Ware and Broxbourne campuses. The aggregation of HRC’s standalone servers into the BladeCenters makes the system compact and easy to use, and removes any duplication in multiple server operations. The solution can now be housed and managed from a single control point and allows the College to help budget, plan and control their power usage in its network operations centre, including scheduling ‘down time’ during out of hours periods. The projected savings and carbon footprint reduction are partly achieved through a switch to air conditioned cooling plus an automatic switch-off feature of the IBM blade servers when not required, for example, during the night.

In addition, the new implementation will provide a complete disaster recovery programme enabling the College to reduce down time to minutes instead of hours or days. The IBM solution also makes use of clustering to provide fault tolerance and load balancing to make the network more robust. Effective storage optimisation adds further resilience so the College can ensure all data is fully protected. The College will be able to provision new applications in minutes, instead of days or weeks and time is also saved on patch testing and new server-controlled software testing. Furthermore, day-to-day maintenance demands will also be reduced through the introduction of virtual desktops.

According to Desdra Kingdon, Finance Manager at Hertford Regional College: “IBM stood out from the pack with an innovative solution allowing us to achieve our objectives in saving ongoing energy costs, reducing our carbon footprint and removing the threat and financial burden of network failure.”

Dr. Daniel Hidlebaugh, appointed as Network Services Manager to drive the HRC project, added: “The new system created with IBM is the result of over a year’s work from my team. I assessed the IT and networking needs of the College and matched them with an innovative supplier who could not only provide the level of innovation needed, but also met and exceeded all of our objectives. IBM offered added value with, for example, a strong after-sales service and the opportunity to try out the new system against our current provider to help make the final decision to buy.”

The new system allows HRC to create a dynamic and scalable infrastructure, setting the College in good stead for the future. The IBM team will continue to work closely with the College IT team to provide expertise and continued support in the run up to the launch to students next month.

Jayne Moore, IBM Client Manager said: “Hertford Regional College used an IBM-funded pre-sales proof of concept in their own environment to confirm the benefits of our BladeCenter solution. We got great feedback from the trial and the College was able to confirm the redesign would deliver the expected benefits they required.”

Notes to Editors

Additional Information

For more information about IBM in the UK public sector, visit: www.ibm.com/easyaccess/publicsector

For more information on Hertford Regional College, visit www.hrc.ac.uk 

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