New Buildings and Apologies
In the grand tradition of this blog, I need to apologise for not posting again. I don't have much of a defence, except that I've been very busy at work for reasons that I can now talk about:
My employer has finally received all the confirmations, funding and planning permission we need in order to start building an entirely new campus which should be finished in 2010. I am delighted to finally be able to talk about this in detail - while it's hardly been a secret that we've been planning to do this for some time, it has only been now that the final pieces have fallen into place and the college's building contractors can actually start breaking ground. £30 Million may not be much to spend on a new building compared to some projects but in our part of the education sector it is a considerable amount.
As part of this project, I've been working very hard behind the scenes as part of the senior IT staff involved in planning IT facilities and general building facilities (which are all expected to connect to the network for centralised computer control), and between doing this on top of my 'normal' job, I've not had the energy to post much.
My part in this project is in some ways quite small, but in others we touch every part of the building. It gives me real pleasure to think that no matter what happens, I will be part of the group of people who made a real difference to the education and community of people in Luton for years to come.
Yeah, I'm a little psyched about that, does it show? When we finally get around to putting more stuff online I'll be sure to link to it.
My IT-related point being...?
As a part of this new build, we are currently looking at how to move services between the two campus buildings with little to no disruption to the service provided to our end users. As new college will be built on the large grounds of the current one, the two buildings will be sitting side by side during completion of the build and our move over to it, and this is where things get interesting.
First the obvious: both campus networks will be linked by fibre-optic cable, so physical connectivity while we move isn't an issue, users will neither know or care if their email server is on the same campus as them or not.
Next the inevitable: After being involved in virtualisation for so long, it's inevitable that I'd look for any excuse to reach for it, so this is part of what we're going to be doing here. I've just completed a major project to review and rationalise our network services and we're going to move from our current ad-hoc collection of virtual and physical servers to a properly planned virtual server system based on VMWare's VMWare Infrastructure Enterprise.
Again, no surprises there, unless you're surprised that I hadn't already implemented this sort of system.
Here's the punchline: Talking with both VMWare and Dell (our server/storage vendor of choice), we plan to use VMotion and Storage VMotion to migrate servers and services between the two campuses with little to no disruption (at least compared to unplugging physical servers and moving them by truck then discovering half the drives failed due to that pothole and.....)
Everything's Gone Green
Of course, it wouldn't be a modern IT project if we didn't talk about 'Green computing' would it? A large part of the plans for the new college are based on green principles, with things like Termadeck roofing/flooring, ground source heating, designing the building to use natural light and ventilation in all workspaces, and quite a few other initiatives whose details escape me right now. Part of the justification for the move to a large virtual server setup is to reduce the amount of power consumed by IT, both in terms of the direct electricity use by the servers and in terms of the secondary power use for things like server-room air conditioning.
In phase one of the virtualisation project we plan to reduce the amount of servers in our server rooms by about 60%. Of the remainder, probably another 20% will be virtualised as soon as we're sure things have settled down, and as much as possible of the servers that are left will be moved onto more efficient server hardware, e.g. blades, where possible. This should represent a substantial saving over our current setup before we even move into the new college. We're also investigating thin clients for use in workspaces, but we have not yet reached any conclusions about this; there are some areas where they make a lot of sense (Kiosks, etc) but we still have reservations about large scale use for lesson delivery.