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The Robert Gordon University (RGU) is a dynamic modern university with an international reputation for providing high quality education from undergraduate to PhD level. It offers a range of degree programmes in disciplines as diverse as engineering, law and art – many of which can be studied part-time using the university’s virtual learning environment.

More than 1,200 students from 113 countries and over 10,000 on-campus and part-time students learn via this Virtual Campus, which offers Internet access to a wide range of courses. So the availability of RGU’s datacentre infrastructure is critical to the students’ education.
This infrastructure, however, was struggling to meet the growing needs of its users and performance was becoming a concern. As Peter Glennie, head of IT services for the university, explains: “We were finding it increasingly difficult to manage our growing server estate and keep the infrastructure up-to-date. As a result, access and availability to core staff and student systems could have been at risk.”

To address these issues and simplify the university’s IT management, RGU needed to both upgrade and consolidate its datacentre systems.

“The availability of our IT infrastructure is critical,” comments Andrew McCreath, IT director for The Robert Gordon University. “We therefore had to have an environment that was robust and reliable but also flexible and cost-effective to manage. By consolidating and standardising our datacentre, we knew we could achieve these goals.”
To ensure it maximised its investment in the new infrastructure – which is based on IBM technology – and minimised the migration risks, the university turned to Computacenter.

As well as deploying a new server farm, storage area network and backup system, Computacenter implemented virtualisation software from VMware to increase server utilisation, improve availability and achieve greater consolidation of the estate. “The project involved rolling out a number of technologies which were completely new to us, such as Linux and blade servers,” comments McCreath. “Computacenter played a key role in helping us understand the impact of implementing a shared services environment and refining our IT infrastructure strategy.”

To ensure RGU optimised the potential of the new solution, Computacenter also helped deploy a number of IT management tools. As Paul Casey, a senior technical consultant at Computacenter, explains: “These help to improve the university’s IT efficiency by automating key processes, such as asset management, deployment and predictive failure analysis. The infrastructure has been specifically designed to deliver high levels of availability, business continuity and flexibility to the university staff and students.”

This flexibility includes the ability to dramatically scale up the volume of users and data being supported by the infrastructure. Currently around 15,000 staff, students and partners use RGU’s IT systems, but the solution has the capacity to expand to as many as 50,000 users and 12 Terabytes of data.

A staged migration has seen the gradual transfer of systems. Core applications, such as the Virtual Campus, email, and a business intelligence solution, are already being supported by the new backbone. The whole IT infrastructure is now more resilient.

As well as helping to improve operational efficiency, the upgraded infrastructure will enable RGU to reduce its IT overheads. “By deploying blade servers and virtualisation technology, we are able to decrease the number of physical servers. This will not only help to free up valuable space but also reduce IT support costs and complexity,” adds McCreath