The institute upgraded its virtualisation services
The London School of Economics (LSE) has become the latest higher education institute to turn to cloud solutions to document storage and data access services.
According to reports the institution – part of the University of London – has chosen UK-based virtualisation specialist Holonomix to help implement its cloud strategy, which sees the school using VMTurbo Operations Manager to help application, infrastructure and operational teams perform at maximum efficiency.
As LSE systems specialist Danny Simpson notes, the institute has been using virtualisation for some time – 80 per cent of its operations are running on VMWare vSphere. But with the increased number of virtualised servers and growing number of virtual machines being served by the network, the institution needed upgraded tools to help ensure those applications were being resourced correctly.
"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," Mr Simpson said.
"[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 utilisation and reduce operating costs."
And VMTurbo managing director Andrew Mallaband added: "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."
A number of UK universities have moved to the cloud, with London Met, the University of Leicester and the University of Birmingham among those who have adopted cloud computing at some point this year.
And last year the Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE) announced a £12.5 million initiative to create a shared cloud computing access fund for UK universities.