Daisy helps Royal Holloway University London shrink its data centre

Daisy Corporate Services today announced it has helped Royal Holloway University London (RHUL) reduce its data centre footprint by 75 per cent and achieve energy savings of over 72 per cent with the implementation of a new virtual infrastructure solution based on HPE dHCI technology.

The university’s legacy infrastructure sat at the heart of its IT environment, delivering critical data services to nearly 12,000 students and 2,000 staff split across two main campuses in central London and Egham, Surrey.

Generations of hardware, with various legacy dependencies attributed to them, meant that maintaining efficient day to day support and management was more difficult than it had to be. This was impacting the university’s ability to easily develop and scale to meet its future academic needs. With a significant data centre footprint and increasing energy awareness, regaining control of its infrastructure energy usage was another growing concern.

Working closely with RHUL and HPE, Daisy developed an innovative hybrid solution that addressed current infrastructure challenges as well as targeting other business priorities including technical support, management, education, cost and sustainability.

This large technology refresh was developed under a HPE GreenLake program to provide a guaranteed unit of measure for the entire lifecycle, presenting a consumption model that was delivered as a service.
With immediate commercial benefits to RHUL and a return on investment that could be realised in terms of months rather than years, this ‘as a service’ model had no upfront charges, with well-defined costs to easily budget for future growth and seasonal demands.

Royal Holloway University London Assistant IT Director Zoë Faiz said: “A modern, world-class university needs server infrastructure future-proofed for the cloud age. We’re delighted to have upgraded a critical part of our IT environment so seamlessly with Daisy and HPE. The predicted power and software licensing savings will keep us leaner and greener, and better able to support our staff and students.”

Daisy Corporate Services Head of Education Sales Scott Auld said: “Daisy has been a trusted advisor to RHUL for more than 20 years. The university’s new hybrid cloud solution powered by HPE GreenLake delivers a modern and easy to manage landing zone with enterprise levels of resiliency, availability and intelligence. It’s a future-proof environment fitting for one of the UK’s top education institutions.”