Middlesex University agree multimillion pound IT services deal

Middlesex Universityhas signed a five-year multimillion pound services deal with IBM.

Under the deal, the university will upgrade its IT infrastructure and receive ongoing management services. The contract also includes disaster recovery services.

It will also use IBM virtualisation to consolidate the number of servers it uses from 250 to 25 at its main datacentre. It anticipates this will help reduce its electricity consumption by 40 percent. IBM will also provide a hosted storage environment.

The scalability of the new setup was vital, according to the university, and it expects the virtualisation to increase its storage capacity by 45 percent to 70 terabytes. It already has a campus in Dubai and will shortly open another in Mauritius, and said this project will help with further international expansion.

It also expects reduced operating costs, improved collaboration, increased storage space, improved storage management tools, and higher levels of service. IBM will provide remote IT management and support services.

Paula Vickers, director of computing and communication systems service at Middlesex, said: “We needed to upgrade our existing hardware and were looking for a solution that offered reliable, modern, scalable infrastructure to underpin the university’s business systems and activities.”