APC by Schneider Electric InfraStruXure® offers Napier ‘rock solid’ basis for expansion based on reliability, scalability, space and cost-efficiency

Napier University was formed in 1992 and now has over 14,000 students, of whom one in five are engaged in postgraduate research or study, and almost 2,000 staff.  It is sited across three major campus locations. The growth and range of Napier’s academic activities and the increasing role of IT in delivering a quality academic experience has led to the creation of a specialist infrastructure team to manage the systems and environments that support the University’s IT, servers and electronic storage. 

The Server Infrastructure Team Leader at Napier University, Scott Walkingshaw, explains how the growth of the University is impacting upon the IT function:

“The demand for the University’s IT services is increasing, we have students using our facilities in Edinburgh and China, we also have an online learning system for course work and exams,  it is-critical that these systems are available 24/7”.

The increasing IT-centricity of the University led logically to the need to introduce resilience as a critical driver for mission-critical systems. In turn, resilience created the recognition that the key systems needed housing within a dedicated server room environment that would properly support them.

The location chosen for the new facility put a premium on space utilisation and on efficiency to add to the stated need for resilience. This meant that the process of facility design and installation around the blade chassis configuration was in itself a learning curve as Scott Walkingshaw explains:

“Putting in APC made us realise that we could better monitor and manage the datacentre environment.  Introducing the blade chassis leads you to think how you are going to monitor and manage it – there’s no point in introducing all that expensive equipment and just letting it sit there and do nothing. The original air conditioning was done as part of the building project a number of years ago and was not adequate to cool growth in our infrastructure requirements.

It was important that APC and their Gold Certified Partner, RM Donaldson were available at all stages of the design and installation process, particularly as the energy efficiency implications of the new facility became an increasingly important factor to Scott Walkingshaw and his team:

“Over the past year there has been a big drive to increase energy efficiency at the university. Therefore, the APC solution is ideal.  We had a number of discussions with APC about how the equipment works, it only cools the zone within the cabinet. There’s something like eight fans in each row and the top ones are switched off if there’s nothing within the cabinets – it only cools based on demand. It’s dynamic – a solution that meets our requirements”.

Ultimately, Napier installed a ‘zoned’ facility where the older and low density computing equipment is housed on one side of the room and separated from the higher density equipment. The APC methodology of InRow™ close coupled cooling caters for this ‘mixed density’ configuration. The higher density equipment is being moved progressively into the facility and has the capacity to handle upwards of 100 blade servers across two racks:.

 “APC really comes into its own for a mixed density facility like ours where low and higher density equipment are side by side in the same location. Originally we were going to adopt a cube solution to contain and cool everything in the room but we felt that would have been overkill. If we were not operating at capacity we would have been paying a lot for cooling which was not needed. Therefore we have used APC racks and In-Row™ cooling targeted to the higher density equipment and the existing conventional air-conditioning for the lower density equipment. It’s a good way of doing it”.

The flexibility of the InRow™ cooling system in delivering cooling where it is needed providing  a suitable answer to the energy efficiency and future-proofing requirements of the new facility:

“Cooling is delivered to where it is required, not the whole room which meets our energy efficiency requirements. We were also looking for a long-term solution that would suit our needs for years to come and this system promises to do this.

Compared to the more complex process of deciding on the most appropriate and efficient cooling methodology, the process of specifying the right UPS for the facility was relatively simple:

“We’ve been using a Symmetra® 16kVA UPS. I have used APC on previous jobs so I know it works well and I spec’d that into the design at an early stage. I spec’d another Symmetra® for the Comms Room at Merchiston and at that stage I got RM Donaldson involved in the transfer of existing cabinets onto the UPS”.

Installation was protracted and had to conform to a tight time scale to minimise the disruption to the University’s educational services, taking place during the summer holidays when the majority of students were on vacation and with the load still running in order that mission-critical IT services could be maintained. The move was complicated by problems of moving equipment into the small spaces of the new facility.  RM Donaldson added value to the project by designing and implementing the chosen solutions.

Napier University will continue the process of IT-centricity with an increasing emphasis on server virtualisation, migration, the development of ‘thin client’ architectures and the development of the Sighthill campus. Scott Walkingshaw sees InfraStruXure®  as providing the ‘rock solid’ basis for this expansion due to its reliability, scalability and its design advantages of space- and cost-efficiency:

“Our Sighthill campus is being redeveloped; we have been involved from day one in specifying the new server room and will definitely be looking at similar water cooled solutions to use there.