22 May 2012

Vote for University shared data project

The innovative Shared Virtual Data Centre (SVDC) has been shortlisted in the Collaboration category of this year's Innovation Nation Awards, organised in conjunction with the Guardian.

The project was developed by Yorkshire and Humber Metropolitan Network (YHMAN), to help share new and existing resources in Yorkshire and Humberside. A world-class 'community cloud' has been established across the YHMAN network, which connects 10 universities, 53 colleges and museums and nine councils.

The shared virtual data centre (SVDC), provides shared services based on pooled resources across several data centres. The Pathfinder  is based on three physical hosts based at Leeds, Leeds Metropolitan and Sheffield Universities. 

The SVDC offers a range of benefits, including:

  • Secure environments for 'tenants', hosting applications and data. As well as the University, secure tenancies are available for the Universities of Bradford, Huddersfield, Hull, Leeds Met, Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam and York. 
  • Improving business continuity and disaster recovery, leading to region-wide strategic planning of data centre capacity requirements. The three-way synchronous data storage across the hosts means data will always be available, even if one of the hosts is not. 
  • Reducing the total cost of ownership by reducing over capacity in data centres, economies of scale and support efficiencies. 
  • Reducing the overall carbon footprint of partners by maximising use of existing and planned data centres.

More information and details of how to vote can be found here.  Voting closes 30 May and is limited to one vote per person.   

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