INFRASTRUCTURE SOLUTIONS
Dedicated to infrastructure
Higher education institutions face numerous challenges, including reducing costs, maintaining and improving services while increasing resources, and meeting the technological needs of students and faculty.
Getech Education is a specialist in the education sector – coordinating with IT departments to set up bespoke infrastructure networks. We are a leading provider of data centre solutions for higher education in the UK and can help you meet these challenges.
Higher Education data centre challenges
Data centres for higher education are now almost as important as the buildings themselves. They need to keep expanding due to the increasing demands from students, staff and researchers. However, many higher education institutions still cannot accommodate the growing amount of data whilst keeping everyone’s data secure.
To help combat the growing demands and challenges, Getech has developed the 5-star Data Centre.
Do you have a 5-star Data Centre?
The 5-star Data Centre is a framework of elements required to develop a rugged data centre. Each element should be considered individually and as a whole. As universities grow and move toward becoming smart campuses, they need a robust and reliable IT infrastructure that can grow and evolve. Campus IT leaders must consider faculty, administrative and distance learning needs when planning and building college data centre strategies.
Why do you need a 5-star Data Centre?
There are underlying themes to be considered when constructing any data centre solution. They are the top challenges faced by the Higher Education sector.
The global nature of today’s Higher Education market puts pressure on institutions to deliver an even better working environment for their staff and students. The rise of Big Data and High Process Computing across all research fields is increasing the demands on creaking IT infrastructure. There are also physical challenges, such as space constraints and energy efficiency commitments. However, the most significant issue faced by Higher Education leaders is sustainably managing budgets to meet changes in the education market.
Security
Scalability
Sustainability
What are the components of a 5-star Data Centre?
A successful cloud strategy means thinking about the whole lifecycle – from securely and rapidly migrating your data to managing it all and helping it grow with you. Understanding your institution’s needs from cloud computing infrastructure can be overwhelming if you don’t know where to start. Use our 5-star Data Centre framework to help you discover your infrastructure strategy.
Servers are the engines of the data centre. On servers, the processing and memory used to run applications may be physical, virtualised, distributed across containers, or distributed among remote nodes in an edge computing model. Data centres must use processors that are best suited for the task.
Whether you support high-density, high-performance computing applications, a centralised data centre environment, or remote network closets on campus, you need the correct server configuration. Legacy servers are the bane of an IT department. Known for being slow, inefficient, costly and increasingly complex, they weren’t designed and built for today’s workloads.
Security and reliability
The most important thing you can do to ensure a successful data centre installation is to maintain its efficiency and reliability. You should guarantee a reliable backup system and a solid recovery plan if something goes wrong. The security needs of a university or college are much different from those of other industries, so you should ensure that your facility meets these requirements.
Sustainability
On-prem or cloud? During planning for new data centre infrastructure, one should consider balancing local computing services with cloud services. Many higher education institutions traditionally rely on local servers and storage solutions to power their applications and services.
Scalability
Universities are constantly evolving, with new programs added and existing ones expanding. Consider the most flexible infrastructure to enable you to add new servers as needed.
Currently, the Higher Education sector has been suffering from a limit in data centre capacity. Universities, colleges and schools have had to be quite inventive with their existing data centre infrastructure and have been investing in giving students access to cloud-based systems and services.
Storage solutions are often the unsung heroes of IT infrastructure. Unlike campus Wi-Fi, this back-end component attracts little attention beyond the IT department; emphasis on the cloud has pushed on-premises solutions out of the limelight. But on-premises storage is central to many significant modern campus initiatives, including virtualisation, public safety, student experience and distance learning, among others.
Security
Student and research data should be kept entirely secure at all times. Universities should demonstrate an ongoing commitment to full compliance with all government regulations.
Sustainability
Sustainable data storage is an increasing concern, environmental liabilities that come with storage, especially as the volumes of data continue to grow. There are many factors to consider when planning a sustainable storage solution.
Scalability
Whether you manage data at the edge, in the data centre, or across hybrid, multi-cloud environments, your storage infrastructure must be able to scale across clouds, quickly deploy new services and efficiently process growing amounts of data. Traditional storage infrastructures were designed for a closed data centre and are too inflexible, slow, and complex to support today’s dynamic workloads and evolving data sets across the enterprise.
Modernising your data management infrastructure requires solutions that can scale, accelerate, and protect your data with new simplified designs and affordable consumption models to lower risk and cost.
Data centre networking incorporates computing services, including switches, routers, load balancing and analytic software that enable the collection and distribution of data. Create a safe and secure learning environment by blocking cyber threats – on campus or off. Understanding the strength of your networks is vital to achieving a robust data centre. With ever-increasing numbers of devices connecting to university networks each day, ensuring access layer security becomes a critical need. Hybrid and remote working growth has meant that proper security measures to mitigate access layer attacks have never been so critical.
Security
There has been a massive increase in student and remote worker numbers, including faculty and staff, connecting to the network. How strong is your network security? Increased cybercrime and attacks can lead to reputational risk and potential breaches of security compliance.
Sustainability
Student expectations of a modern, digital and sustainable campus experience are high. Higher Education institutions need to save time and money on campus operations, energy and labour costs and ultimately need to meet sustainability mandates and goals.
Scalability
Campus networks are in constant flux, with devices from employees, contractors and guests coming and going at all times. Increased numbers of remote students and workers connecting to the network lead to increased numbers of network vulnerability points.
Software refers to the applications used by the business, such as web servers, content management systems and the OS. The OS is responsible for managing system resources and hardware and connects your software and the physical resources that do the work.
Software is any infrastructure component that requires additional hardware as a host environment. Hardware and software work together to form a holistic IT setup. This setup includes a single PC using a software OS, a suite of productivity apps and security software, and a large, multi-ecosystem with different endpoints. It includes Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems, containerised environments to build applications, and cloud storage hosted on a remote server. Software components have increasingly become central to IT operations, replacing many conventional hardware components.
Software-defined infrastructure
Software-managed virtualised hardware has been around for many years as virtualised machines (VMs). Ease of management and updates, automation of complex processes and no need to replace hardware when a simple software update provides you with additional functionality.
It is only natural that this would eventually expand beyond virtual machines. Software-defined solutions have become the most straightforward way to manage all aspects of any infrastructure. One interface to manage every component reduces complexity, resource allocation and time spent configuring or troubleshooting. Other advantages include unlocking functionality via a simple license upgrade, smaller solution footprint, simple solution design, hardware vendor flexibility and lower power consumption.
Your needs are specific. Our expert consultants and technicians can meet them with their extensive industry experience and deep technical knowledge.
We can provide end-to-end services for your next infrastructure project.
One-stop-shop
Our presales, solution architects, project managers and deployment specialists will support you from conception through completion.
Design
From simple to complex, we’ll work with you to find the right solution for your one-of-a-kind strategic and institutional needs. We’ll evaluate your current environment, identify fiscal or technological constraints, envision system and infrastructure improvement opportunities and test the possibilities to find the best fit for you.
Execution
Implementing a new solution can be time-consuming and labour-intensive. Streamlining your data centre application will enable you to embrace new technologies quickly and easily. We’ll help to minimise risks while ensuring your new solution meets your unique needs.
Achieve a 5-Star Data Centre with Getech
Download our 5-Star Data Centre Solutions Guide to help you implement a robust data centre.
Harness the power of Lenovo for Higher Education
Lenovo is a global technology leader that provides innovative solutions to meet the needs of higher education institutions. With a focus on cutting-edge technology, Lenovo provides infrastructure solutions that are designed to enhance the learning experience for students, faculty, and staff.
Lenovo partnership
As a Lenovo 2023 Platinum 360 Partner, Getech offers product expertise and technical advice on Lenovo’s infrastructure solutions portfolio.
infrastructure solutions
Types of infrastructure
Traditional infrastructure
With a traditional infrastructure, the components – like data centres, data storage and other equipment – are all managed and owned by the business within their own facilities. Traditional infrastructure is considered expensive to run and requires large amounts of hardware, power and physical space.
Cloud infrastructure
Cloud infrastructure describes the components and resources needed for cloud computing. You can create a private cloud by building it yourself using resources dedicated solely to you. Or you can use a public cloud by renting cloud infrastructure from a cloud provider like Alibaba, Amazon, Google, IBM or Microsoft. By incorporating some degree of workload portability, orchestration and management across multiple clouds, you can create a hybrid cloud.
Hyperconverged infrastructure
Hyperconverged infrastructure allows you to manage your compute, network and data storage resources from a single interface. With software-defined compute and data storage bundled together, you can support more modern workloads with scalable architectures on industry-standard hardware.
Infrastructure as a service
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) gives you all the power and strategic advantage of the latest data centre hardware through a pay-as-you-go business model. Easily scaled without incremental capital investments and focus more on your bigger picture thanks to the included 24/7 proactive monitoring, management, and services.
Lenovo TruScale offers businesses of all sizes an everything-as-a-service platform with the flexibility they need to stay competitive with a scalable, cloud-like consumption model and predictable payment options for hardware and service inclusions.
Security you control
Get the peace of mind and the benefit of physical on-premises security, capacity control and data protection
Quickly provision new capability
Easy to scale without incremental capital investments, keeping you ready for peak business performance
Stay ahead of change
Get the latest Lenovo hardware that meets your evolving needs and enjoy faster refresh cycles
Right-sized, all the time
Enjoy the advantages of on-premises data centre hardware and services through a pay-as-you-go model
How to buy
We are an approved supplier to all principal public sector buying frameworks to ensure maximum value for purchasing IT products and services. We support higher education institutions in achieving cost efficiencies without compromising the level of choice and compliance.
SSSNA
Getech is a confirmed supplier in partnership with Lenovo on the SSSNA. This framework is for providing Servers, Storage and Solutions, including virtual appliances, support and maintenance and warranty extensions, software-defined storage and backup solutions. It also includes compute and server-related solutions, converged, hyper-converged, HPC and associated infrastructure.
Existing customers
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Getech’s device-to-desk service keeps the University of Wolverhampton running smoothly
Build your 5-star Data Centre with Getech
Contact us to find out more about how we can help your institution manage your infrastructure needs