Middlesex University has signed a five-year contract with IBM to upgrade and manage its IT infrastructure and provide disaster recovery services. The contract is part of Middlesex University’s enhanced efficiency goals and future IT strategy.

Under the agreement, IBM will implement a hosted, virtualised server and storage environment and provide emergency back-up from a further IBM data centre, enabling a robust disaster recovery system.

The University will also see a reduction in the power and space requirements of its on campus machine rooms, helping it to meet government energy saving targets. By using a variety of virtualisation systems the University will reduce the number of machines from around 250 to 25 at the primary data centre. Electricity usage will be cut by 40 percent, from around 47 kW/hour to 27 kW/hour and physical space requirements from approximately 1,000 square feet to 400 square feet.

Steve Knight, Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Middlesex University, explained, “We need a system that allows flexibility according to our changing requirements and this solution does just that. We were looking for a platform solution to compliment our longer term plans to achieve a dynamic infrastructure. In IBM we have a found a partner who shares our technology vision and can help us achieve our strategic goals.”

Paula Vickers, Pro Vice-Chancellor and Director of Computing and Communication Systems Service at Middlesex, said, “We needed to upgrade our existing hardware and were looking for a solution that offered reliable, modern, scalable infrastructure to underpin the University’s business systems and activities. A key requirement was a solution that also helped reduce our carbon footprint through the deployment of modern, energy-saving hardware.”