Scotland’s oldest university is set to save tens of thousands of kilowatt hours, as it targets sustainable operations
At the board level, sustainability is becoming a serious talking point. With generative AI driving demand for data centers and in turn pushing up emissions, leaders have to think about their company’s carbon footprint.
Ben Holme, associate CIO for infrastructure at the Univeristy of St Andrews, is one such leader. His role demands he take care of the university’s cloud and networking systems, as well as its servers, storage, and data centers.
Holme tells ITPro that just as everyone plays a role when it comes to cybersecurity, every department also has a responsibility to help their organization hit its sustainability targets.
“Sustainability is really, really important to us,” Holme says. “We are teaching the leaders of tomorrow, so it’s important that we entrench this in students,” he adds, explaining that the institution tries to embed it into everything it does.
This was ultimately the improvement the University of St Andrews saw when it made the move to Pure Storage’s flash solutions, despite it not being the initial trigger for making the switch.
“When I started in the role five years ago, we had Dell storage solutions,” Holme says. “We had a flash-based solution for our block storage platform, and we had … disk-based solution for file.”
Around five years ago the previous disk-based solution was updated to a disk-based solution that operated with a very small amount of flash acceleration in the front end.
