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Thursday 18 April 2013

Digital Scotland Roadshow

At Edinburgh Conference Centre
Recently I presented at a Digital Scotland Roadshow on the delivery of IT transformation at the University of St Andrews. The audience was from across all areas of the public sector and related bodies.
 
We all face a huge challenge at present trying to deliver efficiencies whilst also trying to keep up with ever increasing consumer (citizen/student/employee. etc) expectations.
 
I'm very impressed by the various Digital Scotland documents and working hard to ensure there is general alignment with these within my own strategy documents and operational plans.
 
 

Sunday 14 April 2013

IT Apprentices... we're recruiting more

As you'll have seen from previous posts, my IT Apprentices are a very welcome addition to the department.  I was so impressed, I asked the University if I could recruit more - and they said yes - as they too recognise the real benefits these young people can bring to an organisation.  Not only do the Apprentices learn from us, the IT professionals - we learn from them. 
 
QA have recently published a case study about our success story at St Andrews. 

http://apprenticeships.qa.com/success-stories/employer-case-studies/university-of-st-andrews


Steven and Peter working in our PC Clinic

Saturday 6 April 2013

Green Enterprise IT Awards 2013

University of St Andrews receives Honorable Mention







Our Data Centre has again been recognised for it's Facility Design-Implementation.  The Green Enterprise IT Awards 2013 have given St Andrews an Honourable Mention in their annual awards.  Looking at the list of worldwide companies involved in these awards, I am, yet again, thrilled that the judges were impressed by what we've achieved in a small University in a small town in Fife!



The University of St Andrews, which is about to celebrate its 600th anniversary, expects to reduce its carbon footprint by some 6,800 tonnes over 10 years and has made a commitment to be carbon neutral for energy supply by 2016. Information Technology has a significant part to play in this.


The University has redeveloped an existing building on a brownfield site into a state of the art datacentre, using a modern twist on traditional design, to yield high energy efficiency, in a compact package, with detailed attention to noise abatement, thus gaining residential certification in a conservation area.

The datacentre has fully contained hot/cold airflow and indirect free cooling for the majority of the year. Exhaust air is used to heat the generator sets. Enhanced detailed telemetry has allowed a high degree of component optimization at part load and the efficiency improvements achieved, both in design and post-implementation, are relatively easily applied to legacy datacentres, and to optimize modern part-loaded facilities.

The datacentre is broadly designed to be resilient to single component failure, and has offered 100% uptime since construction.
A project group of involved stakeholders controlled the design and implementation and an operations board oversees ongoing continuous improvements. We are currently undertaking modifications which are expected to reduce our annualized PUE towards 1.2 despite being less than 40% loaded at this time.
The organization has received a BCS CEEDA Gold award for the facility and the design was used as part of the development of the BREEAM datacentre scheme.


More details: 
http://symposium.uptimeinstitute.com/geit-awards
http://symposium.uptimeinstitute.com/geit-awards/1950-600-year-old-university-builds-highly-energy-efficient-gold-ceeda-award-winning-data-center