The London School of Economics (LSE) has become the latest higher education institution to adopt cloud computing.
The college, part of the University of London, which specialises in social sciences and is recognised as a global leader in research, has chosen UK-based virtualisation specialists Holonomix to help implement its new cloud strategy. The institution will now be using VMTurbo Operations Manager platform to help extract maximum efficiency from applications, infrastructure and operational teams.
The LSE has already been using virtualisation for some time, with 80 percent of its virtualised environment running on VMWare vSphere. This encompasses three clusters, 20 physical hosts, 564 virtual machines and approximately 38 terabytes of storage. However, with the increased number of virtualised servers inhabiting the environment, the institution found its existing tools were unable to provide the intelligence necessary to ensure applications were resourced properly.
Danny Simpson, systems specialist for IT services at LSE said: “At the LSE, we have a fundamental belief in economics and to see VMTurbo apply the same principles in their approach to automating control across virtualised data centres made them a natural fit.”
“[The solution] has given us the ability to better dictate how infrastructure resources are allocated to applications and workloads managed by our application and web teams … and has dramatically improved our ability to ensure performance, increase utilization and reduce operating costs,” Simpson added.
Andrew Mallaband, managing director for VMTurbo in the United Kingdom, said: “Virtualised infrastructure and cloud adoption continues to grow at a rapid pace, creating a need to change the operational approach to automate and control these complex environments.”
The LSE is the latest in a string of UK universities to move to the cloud. So far five institutions have chosen to adopt some form of cloud computing this year alone, including the University of Leicester, the University of Birmingham and London Metropolitan University.
