Case Study
Background
The University of Derby's Learning Centre, based at the Kedleston Road campus, provides library and IT facilities to all University students and houses 300 PC workstations as well as meeting facilities for up to 900 students and academics. The Learning Centre is one of the University's key buildings and offers all students a focal point for their studies by providing access to a wealth of online study materials including course notes, journals and discussion forums, which can also be accessed remotely from all halls of residence and the Internet.
The Challenge
The Learning Centre continues to make as much information available online as possible and demand is high to take advantage of these materials - not only by the students but also by the academics for both research and assessment purposes. The University was keen to make more information available online but this was creating two key challenges: how to cope with the volume of data being generated and also how to house all of the equipment to deliver the service. The Learning and Information Services IT department began its search for a local hosting company that could help accommodate the necessary expansion of data servers needed to fulfil the demand by the students and teaching staff but also one that could offer world class facilities.
"The demand for this service has exceeded our expectations. The issue however was one of time and space. Our own hosting facilities were fast being outstripped as was our ability to effectively manage and protect the data until our new Markeaton campus is available."
Tony Brookes - Head of Infrastructure Services, University of Derby
The Solution
Griffin Internet based in Pride Park offers world class hosting facilities for companies across the UK. The company's local reputation has steadily grown since its formation in 1993 and has won many local and national business awards.
"Griffin was recommended to us by a number of associates as a company that would deliver what they said when they said they could. Whilst we were looking for a local company it was paramount that they had the facilities to partner with us effectively."
Tony Brookes
Griffin met with the University in November 2005 and by February 2006 a complete and bespoke solution had been created. Griffin provided a 1GB Ethernet connection together with a 100MB back up from the Learning Centre directly to its hosting centre where twenty servers were allocated to house and protect the University's data.
The data is housed in one of Griffin's three data centres across the UK and each of the three offers world class hosting facilities. Twenty four hour surveillance is in place as well as the perfect controlled environment to ensure that the servers operate at optimum performance. Temperatures and humidity are controlled and constantly monitored to ensure that overheating is not a problem and this is all backed by Griffin Internet's Service Level Guarantees.
Griffin Internet provides the University with a 100% business continuity guarantee which ensures that every possible effort is maintained to keep the Learning Centre's valuable resources available to students and academics 24 hours a day
The Benefits
By sourcing additional server room capacity the University's IT department was more able to manage the future expansion of the online resources, as Griffin Internet's data centre is well placed to accommodate any future expansion in the numbers of servers required. The University's IT department also has peace of mind that the University's data is fully protected and managed which allows them to focus on other important strategic IT issues. The IT department is now focusing its time on improving the functionality of the online resource and adding improved features - time that they previously did not have.
"Working with Griffin was extremely easy and we were surprised at how quickly they not only responded to our brief but also how flexible they were able to be. We now have the ability to meet the rate of change demanded by the business."
Tony Brookes