The greening of UCC’s IT
UCC’s green drive is continuing with the university partnering with Dell Technologies to support its IT transformation plan.
The move is increasing the overall energy efficiency of UCC’s IT infrastructure, while bolstering its credentials as a green university.
Renowned for world-class teaching, UCC is an internationally competitive, research-led university that plays a key role in the development of Ireland’s knowledge-based economy. With the onset of the pandemic and the pivot to hybrid ways of learning and teaching, UCC needed to quickly shift its ways of working and put its IT infrastructure at the centre of its operations.
Legacy equipment and minimal storage capacity created a barrier to achieving this IT transformation. At the same time, to remain competitive, the university needed to develop a superior and reliable user experience, while improving its response time to requests.
UCC turned to Dell to adopt infrastructure to modernise its processes – specifically around backups and disaster recovery. Using Dell PowerEdge servers and Unity SAN appliances, UCC established modern storage, compute, and secure backup solutions using Dell Data Domain with tiering to public cloud. UCC could then retire legacy systems while meeting increasing demands for storage and compute for resource-intensive applications.
UCC is the world’s first Green Flag Campus and has a strong commitment to sustainable practices. Crucially, the new servers help UCC reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Updating to Dell PowerEdge servers has reduced annual greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 70% year-on-year while reducing power usage by over 50% and requiring close to 40% less cooling.
Gerard Culley, Director of Information Technology at UCC, said: “When we looked for a partner for our infrastructure needs, we wanted to work with an organisation that shared our values and strategic goals. UCC is committed to working towards a more sustainable future and with that comes an obligation to partner with an organisation that shares this commitment. That’s why we chose to partner with Dell Technologies.
“With the help of Dell’s PowerEdge servers, we were able to put in place modern, resilient storage and compute solutions and achieve incredible results when it came to our energy and carbon footprints. With Dell’s solutions, we’ve completely modernised our IT infrastructure so that we can deliver more flexible, sustainable, secure and resilient digital services and solutions to our staff and students for years to come.”
Jason Ward, Vice President & Managing Director, Dell Technologies Ireland, said: “With remote and hybrid learning now the reality for most third level institutions, UCC reached out to us to deploy a modern digital infrastructure and help UCC staff and students avail of a central and functional IT system.
“At Dell Technologies, we are determined to meet the needs of today without compromising the ability to meet the needs of future generations. Since 2013, we have reduced the energy intensity in Dell PowerEdge servers powered by Intel processors by 83%. By harnessing the power of modern storage solutions, we are able to support the university as it continues to thrive as an innovative, competitive and sustainable research-led hub,” he said.