Research in the UK has been given a boost this week as specialist data centre provider, Infinity, secured a five year framework agreement with Janet, the UK's national research and education network, provided by Jisc.
The deal sees the creation of a Jisc data centre to support the requirements for academic research and will be the first shared data centre for medical and academic research in the UK. The funding of approximately £900,000 to make the facility happen has been provided by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE).
At launch, in September 2014, the Jisc data centre will house the IT of a consortium of six of the UK's most successful scientific and academic organisations.
Infinity will operate the data centre at its flagship Slough data centre in the UK. The design combines a traditional three tier datacentre with a flexible range of low to high power rack densities and an aggregated discount pricing structure across all organisations using the service, ensuring that the infrastructure is workload focused and value driven. This is the first large scale example of high performance computer environments being placed in an outsourced co-location facility.
The new Jisc data centre which will grow to more than 800 racks' capacity will be a significant enabler in achieving its aims of improving the speed and quality of UK research. This will allow the community to share large swathes of data, helping to push the traditional boundaries of teaching, learning and research methods. For researchers, the high capacity of the Janet network backbone allows the linking of large data storage and high performance computing facilities at national and international levels.
The initial Jisc partners include University College London (UCL), Kings College London, The Sanger Institute, The Francis Crick Institute, The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and Queen Mary University of London (QMUL).
