Redwood facility highlighted at the European IT and Software Excellence Awards, 2017

Cardiff’s High Performance Computing facility highlighted at the European IT and Software Excellence Awards, 2017.

Work to upgrade the University’s datacentre has led to Schneider Electric, the global specialist in energy management and automation, winning the prestigious ‘Datacentre Solution of the Year’ category at the European IT and Software Excellence Awards.

The award follows the upgrade project which was delivered in conjunction with APC™ by Schneider Electric™ Elite Partner Comtec Power, a leading UK data centre design and build company.

Working with Comtec and CoolTherm, the University designed, populated and upgraded its datacentre, utilising components of Schneider Electric’s InfraStruxure (ISX) datacentre physical infrastructure solution, specifically the StruxureWare for Datacenters: Datacenter Operations Energy Efficiency software module to assist with the monitoring and tuning exercise. As part of this programme of work high efficiency turbomiser chiller units were also installed to improve the operational effectiveness of the datacenter.

The upgrade improved the Power Usage Effectiveness level from 1.8 to 1.2 during the work conducted in December 2014 and optimized through Q1/2015.. This in turn significantly improved the operational efficiency, saving over £100,000 during 2015 and will provide the key stakeholders with a return on investment (ROI) in less than five years.

The investment in the Energy Efficiency module has fine-tuned the services operation to achieve the best PUE possible for the mix of climate, HPC server demand and services efficiency. The upgrade has provided immediate energy efficiency improvements.

For further information on this, please visit the Comtec website.