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Saturday 28 September 2013

Please support Action for Children - sponsor me!


Did you know that each year in the UK:

§  100,000 young people are homeless

§  1 in 3 young people will attempt to take their own life

§  1 in 7 young people will be sexually abused

On Friday night (4th October) I’m taking part in Byte Night to raise much needed funds for Action for Children - a charity who supports and speaks out for the UK’s most vulnerable and neglected children and young people.  Action for Children helps to prevent youth homelessness through early intervention by ensuring that young people across the UK are given the support they need before it's too late.
  

On 4th October I’ll be ‘sleeping rough’  to raise awareness and funds for this great cause. 

Byte Night is the IT industry's annual sleep out in support of Action for Children. Each year hundreds of individuals and teams (including a team from ITS) from across the technology and business community spend a night exposed to the elements in a bid to raise sponsorship and awareness of Action for Children's work to help prevent youth homelessness.


So, the purpose of my blog is to ask you to sponsor me - PLEASE!    Overall, the events across the country hope to raise £1m.  

To sponsor me, please go to our fundraising page: 
http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/team/StAndrewsITS


To find out more about Byte Night and the work of Action for Children, please go to:
http://www.bytenight.org.uk/



Many thanks in advance for your support

 

Thursday 5 September 2013

Virtualisation and Consolidation

One of the larger projects my team and I are involved in at present is one to consolidate the University's IT estate. Like any large organisation the dependency on IT has never been greater and around the clock availability of key systems is now an expectation (but not always a reality - see my blog post re. Outages!). With many buildings and a wide range of servers our aim is to consolidate as much as possible and reduce the distribution of servers and storage serving users across the campus.
Being a University we will always have an elements of distributed equipment however where it makes economic sense to do so we will aim to provide the service centrally. Good examples of this are systems such as email, authentication, storage, network services, telephony, etc.

Not only are we reducing energy consumption but we are also reducing our carbon output. I was recently interviewed by Graeme Burton of Computing and the article was published in this weeks Computing and can be found at http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/feature/2291483/driving-down-costs-and-carbon-emissions-at-the-university-of-st-andrews