The University of Winchester is one of the top universities in the UK, ranked 10th for teaching excellence in 2016. It has approximately 6,500 students and over the last decade has invested heavily in its facilities and infrastructure, including the development of a new teaching block and three student villages. In tandem, the university is committed to building a modern virtualised IT infrastructure. A data centre housed on the main campus supports the university’s core IT infrastructure. Prior to Eaton’s involvement, the university’s network was comprised of competitor UPS systems, whose batteries had failed and which were unable to provide the required network resilience.

The university urgently needed to replace the existing smaller UPS units (housed in student villages across its campus), which protected the Edge IT infrastructure to ensure the availability of IT services to students around the clock. The existing units’ batteries had failed without warning, the first sign being noticeable fumes coming off the units. As a result, the university’s IT team made the crucial decision to find a new provider for its UPS requirements. Crucially, the university wanted to avoid any future scenarios where this could happen again. What was required, therefore, were new UPS units that would enable it to monitor the condition of the batteries and provide proactive diagnostics. The university is moving towards a virtualised environment and wanted to take the opportunity to bring in power management software that could be integrated with its existing VMware servers, so that it could manage the entire estate through a single pane of glass.

The university had made a conscious decision to avoid like-for-like product replacements, instead opting to install superior solutions that would bring additional value and reassurance, notably in management and monitoring of the overall solution, as well as working with legacy equipment and helping to manage a move to a virtualised environment. The key criteria were:

• Remote control and management of the IT equipment

• Close integration with a VMware virtualised IT environment

• Proactive monitoring and predictable maintenance of the infrastructure

Solutions

Eaton provided a range of different UPS units, with power management software supported by a remote management service. For the University of Winchester, Eaton’s software was a crucial point of differentiation in the market.

Eaton’s Intelligent Power Management (IPM) software was chosen to support business continuity across the entire estate. The software enables the university’s IT team to manage its mission-critical applications across the network directly from the VMware vCentre virtualisation dashboard offering a single-pane-of-glass approach to the entire IT solution. The system can be pre-configured to prioritise the most critical applications to keep them running in case of unscheduled outages while switching off less critical ones or limiting the power to certain applications. Virtual machines in the university’s network can be shut down through Eaton’s IPM, while restarts are controlled by the VMware vCenter virtualisation management software. As such, both shutdowns and restarts are performed in a manner that minimises downtime and eliminates the risk of data loss.

Eaton installed 50 5PX single-phase 3 kVA units across the campus, each providing a critical runtime of up to 20 minutes in the event of a power failure, long enough to ride out short power outages with no loss of functionality. Eaton also installed two 9SX UPSs 5000i to support higher power switching at the network distribution layer, as well as a 93PM UPS in the University of Winchester’s data centre.

All of the UPSs installed at the University of Winchester are new products that have been launched within the last three years, which ensures that they offer the best possible efficiencies in terms of power and running costs, as well as providing as much usable power as possible. But more than that, the UPS units also feature Eaton's patented ABM technology that enables proactive diagnostics of battery life, giving the university’s IT team up to 60 days’ warning ahead of a battery’s end of useful life, which is enough time to hot-swap the battery without switching off any IT equipment. Given their experience with battery failure, this significantly boosted the peace of mind of the University of Winchester’s IT team. The university chose Eaton’s Green Care UPS service contract, which gives them five years of protection through remote monitoring and preventive maintenance visits to give them further proactive support and reassurance.

Results

The University of Winchester now has a data centre and network infrastructure that is more resilient, future-proofed and ready to grow with its needs. Since implementing the Intelligent Power Management software, the university has been able to gain much better insights into what’s happening with its IT suite and at power level – in fact, it was able to track that the UPS units have kept its IT system running on a vast number of occasions, despite more than 1,500 small power outages and interventions over the last year. The proactive diagnostics of the Advanced Battery Management system also enable the university to schedule IT maintenance outside of term time, thereby further increasing up-time.