This move will help put UniMAP at the forefront of ICT facilities among universities, says UniMAP IT Head Nasrudin Abd Shukor.
Higher technical education institution Universiti Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP) is to build a green data centre using Juniper MetaFabric architecture to help enhance IT services and cut operating expenditure.
Nasrudin Abd Shukor, director of IT for UniMAP said the new facility, due to be fully operational by February 2015, will help UniMAP to "dramatically reduce the environmental footprint and operational costs of its data centre operations while enhancing service delivery to students, staff and external parties."
"At a time when data centre operations are under pressure to enhance its service delivery to students, academicians, staff and external parties while adhering to green environmental footprint and lower operational costs, Juniper Networks MetaFabric architecture, which includes security and network management solutions have been identified, selected and deployed at our Pauh Putra campus new data centre to help us, achieve the above," said Nasrudin.
He said that as the new architecture will use far fewer devices than a conventional data centre network, Juniper Networks QFabric System requires anywhere from 68 percent to 89 percent less power.
"At the same time, the new data centre network designed with microseconds latency will enable us to provide leading-edge data centre access, putting UniMAP at the forefront of ICT facilities among universities in Malaysia," said Nasrudin, adding that the new facility is designed to support cloud operations.
He said that UniMAP's ICT Centre currently offered more than 50 Web-based systems to students and staff, several of which are already being offered as apps for Android mobile platforms. With average port-to-port latency of just three microseconds across the QFX3000-M, the new cloud data centre infrastructure was expected to deliver considerably faster system response times and greater reliability on service delivery
"Leading educational institutions today require a network that can keep up with the rigorous demands of their business and leverage the cloud in a smart and evolutionary way," said Juniper Networks senior vice president, Asia Pacific, Wendy Koh. "We are delighted that UniMAP has selected our MetaFabric architecture that allows their new data centre to operate as a single pool of network resources, providing tremendous levels of flexibility and efficiency, ultimately improving service delivery to students, staff and external parties."
Consolidation and Cloud Koh said by Using Juniper Networks QFabric, UniMAP will be able consolidate about 100 existing servers onto a few high-capacity blade servers that have been sized to run up to 200 virtual machines, delivering a further reduction in power consumption and space requirements to support exiting services.
She added that the QFX3000-M QFabric System provided scope for UniMAP to scale its data centre operation to well over 30 times its current size.
This data centre headroom can be used by UniMAP for new e-services, teaching purposes, research using high-performance computing and even for the possibility of providing cloud hosting services to local government departments in the state of Perlis, said Koh.
UniMAP, which has about 6,000 students and more than 1,700 academic and non-academic staff, focuses on electronics-based engineering and related fields and is also the hub of eight specialist research clusters.
