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Downing College, Cambridge

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Cambridge College embraces server and storage virtualisation for increased system availability, agility and green benefits

College Profile

Downing College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college was founded in 1800 through a bequest made by Sir George Downing. The College is home to a lively and diverse scholarly community, including about 420 undergraduates, 220 graduates and 54 fellows, supported by over 130 staff. It has a unique and magnificent setting amid 20 acres of lawns and trees, yet is in the very centre of Cambridge. The buildings, which are predominantly neo-classical in style, convey a sense of elegance and spaciousness.

Downing College had a requirement to build more resilience into their entire server platform. Areas of the environment were protected with technology like clustering but this was complex, didn’t cover the whole estate and therefore simply wasn’t enough. With certain growth in the number of applications requiring resilient uptimes, Rob Beardwell, IT Manager from Downing realised that simply adding to the existing physical server estate was not a sustainable option. “The main driver for investigating virtualisation was the ability to provide an environment that would serve our changing requirements” explained Rob. “We now have applications and services that need to be running 24/7. We can handle a little downtime but it needs to be at a time of our choosing. The side effect of being able to implement our upcoming new application requirements more sustainably and cost effectively was also a plus point. S3 tackled this challenge with a fresh approach that no other supplier had taken, advising us that they would be able to re-use existing hardware – saving us money and Carbon in the process. It might sound trite, but S3 sold us ideas whereas the other vendors we spoke to wanted to sell us boxes”.

Building on the above, Downing College is the only Oxbridge college to have Carbon Trust Status so replacing their aging server infrastructure with like for like just wasn’t an option from a green perspective and being able to re-use embodied carbon in existing investments made perfect sense

VMware Virtualisation delivers confidence & efficiency

Having looked at virtualisation previously in the guise of Citrix XenServer, Ben Ford, Computer Officer at Downing College found that the management tools available with VMware especially the native vCenter product were far more sophisticated and compatible to their requirements. Additionally the licensing flexibility and cost effectiveness that the VMware Essentials Plus product offered set it apart.

Backup tools were also a big area of focus for Ben. The product that S3 and Downing College chose to back their environment was Veeam Backup and Replication. This tool came as part of the Veeam Essentials Bundle for VMware. With advanced features enabling 10x faster incremental backups, de-duplication of backup files and the ability to restore your entire environment and run virtual machines from backup files themselves it really made managing backups and as importantly restore testing a whole lot easier. The Veeam Essentials Bundle also includes other valuable components such as Veeam Monitor and Veeam Reporter, which enhance the monitoring capability the team has and with the Reporter product documentation and change tracking is taken care of.

Implementation, with the S3 Consulting team working alongside Ben and the rest of the Downing IT Department only took two weeks and the process ran incredibly smoothly. It all happened with minimal downtime to the production environment and very little impact to the end users. ”The advantage in using S3 is that a complex undertaking is condensed into a managed project with clear start and end dates”, said Rob, “We’re a small Department and it’s easy to get drawn off-project by support requirements. Working with S3 enabled us to get the project done without reducing response in other areas.”

The Solution

S3 proposed a solution design to provide multiple levels of high availability/disaster recovery as well as an advanced backup capability. System and data availability are extremely important to Downing College. They now have high availability for the entire server and storage base across three college sites. Should any one of the physical servers fail, all systems that were hosted by that server will restart elsewhere, automatically and within minutes. Additionally they can restore single files or entire virtual servers with a few clicks. This is all underpinned by VMware, HP Virtual Storage Appliances and Veeam backup software.

Ben Ford added that the added agility that the platform provides is already proving useful. The Downing team are now able to add new capacity or new applications extremely quickly; it’s literally a case of 10 minutes rather than weeks for a new physical server to be deployed to support new projects. Tools including VMware’s vCenter Update Manager have helped to improve the manageability and reliability of the college’s virtualised infrastructure and being able to manage everything centrally is a real benefit in terms of the team’s productivity.

*Source – National Energy Foundation Carbon Calculator governance.”

Green IT

“Virtualisation continues to lead the list of top strategies employed by Best-in-Class organisations to jumpstart their green IT initiatives.” explains Chris Bullock, CEO S3 Consulting Ltd. “The reasons for this are straightforward — green IT is about reducing waste. Wasting energy, wasting space and wasting materials, for example, are all costing organisations money and therefore, by doing away with this waste, Downing College has actually saved money. Organisations are now starting to realise the benefits that green IT makes to their bottom line and by adopting green IT strategies Downing has reduced power consumption and other unnecessary spending, while also achieving the benefits of being green.” added Bullock.

Appendix

As part of the planning for the project S3 conducted a capacity planner exercise to examine the 17 servers that were present. All 17 of these are classified as in scope for migration to a virtual platform. The high level results of this analysis can be seen below;

Group% CPU UtilisationCPU QueueDisk UtilisationPages Per SecondNetwork Bytes Per Second
% BusyDisk Queue
Industry Average4.980.675.222.3679.9793,422.81
All Systems Group0.640.040.930.018.6316,761.67

these results demonstrated, the physical server environment at Downing College was performing in line with most x86 server environments in that it was heavily underutilised and an ideal candidate for migrating to a virtual server platform.

Also, now implemented the entire solution will greatly reduce Downing College’s power, cooling and space requirements. It is estimated virtualising these servers will introduce power and cooling savings of on average 74% or £11,261 per annum. More information on the estimated savings can be seen below.

  • Estimated Electricity rate based on information from Downing College = £0.081 per kWh
  • Hours of operation = 52 weeks x 7 days/week x 24 hours per day
  • Multiple of operating power required for cooling = 1.3 – industry average multiple used by VMware
  • Annual growth of electricity rate = 2.5%
  • Annual growth of server numbers = 10%
  • Average operating power (kW) per server :
  • Existing – unvirtualised – 0.40 kW, New – virtualised – 0.75 kW
Savings on server power and cooling20112012201320142015
A) Unvirtulaised environment
(servers decommissioned through virtualisation)
Number of servers1720222427
Power: Operating (kWh)59,40569,88876,87784,56493,021
Power: Cooling (kWh)77,22690,85499,940109,934120,927
Power: Rate (per kWh)£0.081£0.083£0.085£0.087£0.089
Cost of power & Cooling£11,067£13,346£15,047£16,966£19,129
B) Transition to virtualised environment
(2 servers that will be hosts)
Number of servers33333
Power: Operating (kWh)19,65619,65619,65619,65619,656
Power: Cooling (kWh)25,55325,55325,55325,55325,553
Power: Rate (per kWh)£0.081£0.083£0.085£0.087£0.089
Cost of power & Cooling£3,662£3,753£3,847£3,943£4,042
Server power and cooling savings (A-B)£7,405£9,592£11,200£13,022£15,087
66.91%71.88%74.43%76.76%78.87%

“Virtualisation continues to lead the list of top strategies employed by Best-in-Class organisations to jumpstart their green IT initiatives.” explains Chris Bullock, CEO S3 Consulting Ltd. “The reasons for this are straightforward — green IT is about reducing waste. Wasting energy, wasting space and wasting materials, for example, are all costing organisations money and therefore, by doing away with this waste, Downing College has actually saved money. Organisations are now starting to realise the benefits that green IT makes to their bottom line and by adopting green IT strategies Downing has reduced power consumption and other unnecessary spending, while also achieving the benefits of being green.” added Bullock.

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