The University of Cumbria (UoC) is one of England’s newest universities, founded in 2007 after a merger of the St. Martin’s College, the Cumbria Institute of the Arts and the Cumbria campuses of the University of Central Lancashire. The University supports approximately 12,000 and 1,100 staff at both university campuses and partner owned and operated sites.
The University has staff and students spread across 8 campus locations and needed to evaluate how their infrastructure would support their anticipated storage growth rate of 25% per year. In order not only to support future expansion, but to make their distributed estate an advantage and a strength of the University, they needed to make sure their IT infrastructure was fully supported and with capacity to scale to growth. There was also a service need to concentrate internal staff on added value work.
To achieve their objectives the University would need to replace the existing compute and storage environment with an appropriately sized and configured IT infrastructure to support both physical and virtual servers, and with storage to support its growing requirements. Opting for a Managed Services approach would also allow UoC to support their operations without increasing costs or draining additional time and resources, giving their staff the ability to move beyond simply managing and maintaining their IT and instead focus on driving change and transformation.
We wanted to procure the best technology and develop a resilient and streamlined infrastructure, but our primary concern was always what that technology would eventually allow us to do as a university. We wanted our IT services to facilitate collaboration across campuses, support our administrative processes and attract great students. Colin Coghill, Director of IT Services at the University of Cumbria
