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Improving access to information

One of the UK’s largest educational facilities, City College Manchester supports a growing number of students from around the world, and over 1,200 employees. In order to provide 24/7 access to essential materials and services online, the college needed a data storage and protection system to support this.

The challenges

“As we increased the number of college services, we had to continually buy more servers and storage to keep pace with the data this produced. IT management costs were soaring, and we were worried about network integrity as we didn’t have consistent disaster recovery and backup processes.”

“At the time, all our data storage was direct attached. Each server had its own storage that couldn’t be accessed by other servers. This just wasn’t efficient.”

John Goulden, Network Support Manager, City College Manchester

City College Manchester began the process of selecting a vendor to build a storage area network (SAN) that would link each of its four major campuses and partner sites across the city.

“Our key requirements were quality of hardware and an ability to scale to meet future needs,” explains Goulden. “Disaster recovery was also critical.”

The solution

City College Manchester selected a complete solution from XMA, a specialist ICT provider to the UK’s education sector. XMA installed and integrated a SAN across the college’s campuses and implemented a disaster recovery suite to ensure data is stored and replicated for quick and simple recovery. XMA also provided training to the college’s network technicians to ensure they were fully utilising the system’s capabilities. The hardware installed comprised two Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 1000 models, one at each of the college’s two main data centres.

XMA states, “By designing and deploying this complex storage solution, City College Manchester can now quickly and securely store and replicate all of their data. It also provides them with a solid platform for growth.”

Implementation was fast and efficient and was completed in just two weeks. City College Manchester is investing in VMware virtualisation tools as part of a server consolidation drive, and XMA ensured that the new storage infrastructure supported this environment.

Network technicians at the college have found the consolidated storage solution easy to use and manage. If they do need assistance on either the hardware or software, support is available around the clock.

The result

“We can now provision storage as and when we need it, which is absolutely brilliant. We’ve never been able to do it so fast,” says Goulden.

The college can also now monitor and manage its storage more efficiently, spotting problems faster and predicting future requirements. This in turn provides students and staff with higher information availability and better access to services and resources, in line with service level requirements.

Technicians have identified significant time savings by being able to perform data replication and backup procedures more efficiently, and reduced downtime means better time efficiency for users, too.

“With XMA’s new setup, if we lost our primary data centre, we could have all the data back within hours,” explains Goulden. “Before, it would have been a nightmare task that would have taken days to recover just some of the lost data.”

“Recently, one of our network volumes was corrupted. In the past we would have spent hours searching through the tape library for the backup, but thanks to the advanced Hitachi software which is built into the solution, we were able to recover it within 15 minutes.”

John Goulden, Network Support Manager, City College Manchester

The college uses a Novell GroupWise e-mail system and, since deployment, technicians have found that a disaster recovery task which used to take several days can now be completed within an hour. Data replication capabilities have also been found to be very robust. Data at the two main campuses is backed up locally, then between each other while data from remote sites is replicated to the two central data centres. This ensures that no matter where information is stored, it is automatically and securely replicated at a different location. The college’s opening hours are extending and a growing body of international students want access to information from anywhere, at any time.

Goulden concludes, “The College is becoming a 24/7 learning environment and its IT infrastructure is now able to support this important shift. At the time of implementation our data requirement was for 3.5TB and this is growing at 50% year on year. It’s a significant mountain to climb, but we are now equipped with the tools we need to meet the challenge.”

Providing secure data storage to support essential services to the public

Providing local authority services in towns such as Abergele, Colwyn Bay and Llandudno, Conwy County Borough Council covers 113,000 hectares in North Wales. With around 38% of the County Borough lying within Snowdonia National Park and 37 miles of coastline, Conwy also caters for over 8 million tourists visiting the area every year. Due to the broad nature of the services it provides to the public, Conwy’s data storage needs are vast and varied. Conwy’s IT department was faced with three challenges in continuously improving its services to the public: centralising backup, supporting a new generation of internal systems and providing an IT platform for its developing disaster recovery plan.

The Challenge

As a legacy of its creation from the merging of 4 different local authorities in 1996, data was generated and stored by 6 main and 100 satellite Council sites across the County. Islands of storage existed at many Conwy sites with different management and backup techniques employed at each. The disparate nature of this IT environment had led to a general proliferation of unmanaged storage. The challenge of backing up and securing data at each site using tape drives was proving to be an administrative nightmare, and effective information sharing across the enterprise was unable to take place due to the geographic dispersal of the data and the mix of hosting operating systems and associated clients.

“Managing remote servers has always been something of a headache for us. Users had to take responsibility for managing the backup media, and in most cases we had no offsite copies of data to fall back on in the event of a real disaster,” says Principal Technical Support Analyst at Conwy, Will Valintine.

A number of new systems brought in by Conwy to facilitate its operations were another focus area for the IT department. A centralised e-mail programme and replacement payroll system had particularly heavy data storage requirements and needed to back onto a single storage platform in order to facilitate employee access to critical data.

The Solution

IT staff at Conwy had been so impressed by the performance of its previous storage system, a Hitachi Thunder modular storage system that they asked long-term technology partner XMA to propose a suitable Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) solution. XMA recommended 2 Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage (AMS) 500 systems in different locations, with Hitachi TrueCopy® Extended Distance software’s asynchronous capabilities to enable replication between two sites.An AMS500 was installed at the primary site, Bodlondeb in Conwy, with a second installed at the remote site in Colwyn Bay. TrueCopy Extended Distance enables Conwy to store data and support critical applications at the primary site and replicate to its remote site, ensuring copies of all data are available in the event of an incident at the main offices. The Hi- Track® Monitor (a “call home” service/remote maintenance tool) watches the status of the storage environment, reporting any problems directly to the HDS support centre. XMA provided four storage administrators at Conwy with full training on the new system and a mixture of onsite and offsite support was provided 24/7 by HDS. “The Hi-Track Monitor has been invaluable to us,” says Valintine.

“The tool contacts the HDS support centre as soon as it sees a problem and the support centre immediately addresses it remotely. This removes the need for our department to spend time monitoring the system manually and allows us to focus on our strategic IT projects instead”.

“The scalability of the Storage systems means we don’t have to worry about running out of capacity. The team and I can focus on strategic concerns to protect Conwy’s data and guarantee that public services are available for the future.”

Will Valintine, Principal Technical Support Analyst, Conwy County Borough Council

The result

The primary site AMS500 has consolidated the Council’s existing storage, providing a file server platform, which has enabled Conwy to reduce its 15 remote file servers across various sites to just 2 primary file servers. This in turn has led to a significant reduction in management and backup issues, as well easing connectivity and power issues for the 13 servers the Council has been able to decommission.

The data storage consolidation at the council’s primary site means that Conwy’s mission critical applications and data are now together on a reliable system. This has allowed Conwy to be more flexible in the provision of applications and information to client departments. This helps to prevent their storage architecture from becoming a barrier to effective data sharing and has improved information processing across the enterprise. The additional capacity of the solution, currently 12TB at each site, expandable to 64TB, has provided Conwy with the storage space it needs to consolidate all its previously disparate file servers and support the aggressive storage demands of many new systems, including e-mail, payroll, Social Care and Revenues and Benefits systems. The scalability of the system also means that Conwy can easily add capacity to the as and when required.

Having migrated internal e-mail archives and payroll data, as well as data critical to services Conwy residents rely on, such as revenue, benefits and leisure centre records to the new system, Conwy is now looking to the future.

Hitachi Data Systems Research-Data Storage Solution gets high marks from Lancaster University.

Addressing ever increasing data demands

As one of the United Kingdom’s top 10 universities, Lancaster University is a research-led institution with an ambitious strategy to become truly globally significant. The university required a robust, high quality and scalable storage and backup solution to support its business applications and research data storage for at least the next five years.

The existing infrastructure was approaching full capacity and unable to continue supporting its growing data demands. The NAS environment (provided by EMC) was reaching maximum capacity and did not have a non-disruptive route for expansion of its research data storage. The existing EMC backup hardware had also reached end of life, and the backup window and tape quantity as at the practical capacity limit.

Delivering improved flexibility and availability

In partnership with Hitachi Data Systems, we utilised the National Server and Storage Agreement framework to provide a solution for Lancaster University that covered SAN, NAS and backup environments.

Migration was completed in two phases, and two separate NAS platforms were proposed for each main data type: user and research data. For cost efficiency, Lancaster University’s user data is now stored in Hitachi NAS Platform (HNAS) with intelligent tiering based on access frequency. To ensure scalability and reliability, research data is stored in a virtualized Hitachi Content Platform (HCP).

HCP is ideal for the management of business-critical information and utilises Hitachi Unified Storage (HUS): HUS 150 via HUS VM. To provide a high-performance gateway and ensure fast file retrieval and additions, research data is presented via HNAS to users with Hitachi Data Ingestor (HDI) across the two data center locations.

With the university’s current environment composed of about 90% virtualized infrastructure, the optimal solution was to consolidate all data into the virtualized HUS VM, a competitive, cost-effective solution that delivered flexibility and scalability. Best-in-industry capabilities were installed across all areas using HNAS and HUS 150, with backup-free architecture put in place for high-performance NAS research data using HCP.

High-performance, resilient technology

Upon installation of HDS solution, a benchmark test proved its high-performance capabilities, superseding IOPS requirements by 250%. The difference was highly notable as end-user services greatly improved, allowing students, faculty members and administrative staff to work more efficiently, access required services, and maximise use of the research data produced by the university.

Due to virtualisation and advanced flash technology, Lancaster University has accelerated application performance and reduced costs. The university also manages capacity and services more efficiently. To meet government guidelines, data retention was important and Lancaster now has the flexibility to support its projected data growth over the coming years.

Supporting cutting edge computer-based research with Viglen HPC

With Intel® Xeon® Gold processors based on the new Skylake architecture, offering significant per- core performance, Lancaster University are able to meet growing and support of a wide range of HPC workloads on premise.

The University of Lancaster is one of the UK’s largest research institutions, so having access to enterprise class HPC power is mission-critical, the university receives more funding through research than through tuition fees alone. The University of Lancaster has been an HPC user for a few years but decided to adopt a more strategic and centralised approach when they began looking at refreshing and upgrading its resources.

Lancaster University chose XMA as a partner to deliver the new HPC resources, which will allow the university to maintain an enviable record in cutting edge computer-based research. The difference is that Viglen products and services are tailor made for each and every client. By weaving together the team’s high level of experience and expertise, with a solution orientated approach to hardware, XMA can deliver on budget and on brief every time.

Why Intel?

HPC platforms—from the smallest clusters to largest supercomputers—demand a balance across compute, memory, storage, and network. The Intel Xeon Scalable platform was designed to deliver and enable such balance with massive scalability—to tens of thousands of cores. From its improved core count and mesh architecture to newly integrated technologies and support for Intel Optane memory and storage devices, the Intel Xeon Scalable platform enables the ultimate goals of HPC—to maximise performance across proved core count and mesh architecture to newly integrated technologies and support for Intel.

Keeping the IT one step ahead of the expanding University

It is vital that IT delivers an infrastructure platform enabling the University to meet the requirements today and in the future. This platform is based on Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) server and storage technologies and VMware Virtualisation software technologies.

To meet the needs of 23,000 students, 5,000 staff and plans for continual growth in the University’s data and services, the University chose us to refresh and expand their core Storage Area Network (SAN) infrastructure utilising the latest HPE 3PAR storage and providing a dual-site, replicated highly available platform.

Increasing the capacity, resilience and performance of IT

In order to respond to the increasing demands being placed on such a large institution, the University’s new technology solutions need to have high capacity, resilience and performance.

The University needed to replace an existing HPE 3PAR T800 that was due to be decommissioned, and also update software on their existing HPE 3Par V400 array enabling cross-functionality between arrays. At the same time, the University also needed to implement a new SAN fabric into the newly commissioned data centre which would support current and future requirements.

The new environment, utilising hardware, software and the SAN Fabric had to connect the existing HPE based infrastructure, providing a dual site, highly available and resilient platform.

One of the challenges that the project faced was that it needed to be invoiced by December but
could not take delivery until the following March. As part of our commitment to excellent service
delivery, we provided a secure bonded warehouse facility at our St Albans Head Office to store the
19 pallets of HPE infrastructure for four months at no additional cost to the University.

Working in partnership with HPE and XMA the University was able to deliver the project on-time and
on-budget.

A tailored solution meeting current and future requirements

The project commenced with a workshop discussing the requirements in detail with Warwick University’s IT Services, HPE and XMA working together, in partnership. It was clear that the requirement was for a tailored solution maximising the investment in existing HPE and VMware infrastructure whilst also being able to meet current and future requirements and expanded to a dual-site deployment.

The University was already using HPE ProLiant Server and 3Par storage, with VMware vSphere virtualisation software delivering a highly virtualised infrastructure which worked.

This made the decision to expand the environment using HPE technology an easy one and the
University decided to expand to a dual-site, replicated environment utilising:
• HPE ProLiant DL560 Servers
• HPE 3Par V400 StorServ Storage
• HPE SAN Fabric Switches
• HPE 3Par StorServ Replication Suite, including Peer Persistence
• VMware vSphere Virtualisation Software

This enabled the University to maximise existing investment and knowledge, reduce risk and provide
a highly available and resilient infrastructure platform to meet current and future needs.

Moving Warwick University into their future IT Infrastructure

The highly available, saleable and manageable infrastructure based on HPE Server and Storage and
VMware Infrastructure has enabled Warwick University to achieve their goal of expanding IT
Services to support today’s requirements as well as future growth and demands.

Adding value through partnership

So says Gary Sussex, of Newham Council, when describing the benefits of partnering with the IT provider for the past decade. The Council first entered into the 10 year agreement with XMA in 2004 after HP won a contract to supply server, desktop and portable devices through a tendered leasing scheme.

Mr Sussex explains: “We signed the ten-year agreement with HP to provide Newham with the application servers and infrastructure required to support our citizens, we run a mixture of application such as payments services, council tax, etc and host our website in-house”. It also provides the technology used in the back office by 5000 office based staff.

“The whole of the Intel based estate runs on HP equipment including the data centre server and all end user devices (EUD), PCs, laptops, all the equipment have pre-defined refresh incorporated in the lease – all this is provided through XMA. We chose the leasing route as it offered us extra flexibility for managing our IT systems – and XMA has been essential in making the solution work for us.”

Adding Value

He added: “The real benefit of XMA is the value-add they can bring. They deliver the server equipment for us, unpack it, make sure the hardware configuration is correct and put it in the racks for us.

“Our data centre is over the other side of the city so this is a real benefit for us. We have desktop support staff based alongside the data centre who can greet XMA’s technical staff. It means server support technicians don’t have to on-site at that point. It saves them effort and lost productivity. If there are any issues during the installation process there are XMA engineers on site and they can diagnose & rectify the problem straight away.”

As part of the contract, Newham Council refresh all end user devices every four years. However, XMA are flexible enough to schedule the delivers to number of machines the council requires at any given time. Mr Sussex says: “XMA deliver just the amount we want, when we want them, this takes away the need for expensive storage facilities and allows us to provide a just-in time refresh service to our customers. That flexibility is essential especially when we are expecting to refresh 300 + machines in a month for example.

“XMA also mange lease returns. When a lease runs out they will remove the old batch of hardware that we have refreshed and arrange everything with HP with regard to the return of hardware and lease finance. We don’t have to do any of that which takes the pressure away from us completely.”

The partnership between XMA and the Council has been a successful one but only happened after HP recommended XMA as its preferred supplier. Mr Sussex says: “At the beginning, XMA was a supplier we knew little about but it has been a very good
relationship. Since using XMA I would prefer partnering with them over using another HP partner or the HP Direct Service.

What was beneficial about working with XMA?

Single point of contact

Mr Sussex said: “With XMA, we get a single point of contact. Queries are responded to fast and efficiently. We have had situations where they can’t solve a problem but they quite often come up with a workable solution. That flexibility is very useful, in an ideal world, we would have longer lead times for projects but, in reality, we often only get seven to 10 days to supply a solution once internal funding has been secured.

Customer care

Mr Sussex added: “Sometimes a larger organisation is not prepared to go the extra mile for you. With XMA, you have the benefit of a big organisation but they also have the customer care ethos of a smaller company”. “For example, there have been a number of instances when pre-sales technical staff from XMA have given us suggestions for solutions that are significantly cheaper. So they have provided value to us in that way.”

Problem solvers

According to Mr Sussex, XMA staff have also worked with his own team on individual projects. He said: “Contract staff have mentored our staff on project work and that worked out really well. There have also been times when the company has helped solve complex problems for us.

“For example, when we originally set up the agreement with HP we wanted Cisco switches in our data centre but HP couldn’t deliver at that point. Instead, XMA supplied the switches but partnered with HP so they were delivered as part of our overall lease. It meant we could pay for everything together but we could only have the solution we wanted because of the service from XMA.”

“I feel strongly that the approach from XMA is that they are there to help the council – and that is what they do”

“XMA have provided significant value to us.”

XMA comes out on top

Ofsted issued a tender for the supply, implementation and ongoing managed support of a Microsoft Private Cloud solution with over 300TB storage, 500 CPU cores and 8TB RAM (plus a smaller platform at a second site). The requirement included fully-managed migration of approximately 300 production and test/dev systems to the new platform, while addressing their need for a number of secure network environments including a combined user acceptance testing environment and a Disaster recovery failover.

Hitachi scores “outstanding”

We recognised that Ofsted required a platform that provided significant computing resource and a highly resilient storage platform. In response, we proposed a Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) comprising automatically-tiered Hitachi Unified Storage (HUS) and CB500 blades based on the latest Intel Sandybridge processors. Core networking (based on Brocade VDX) was included, as was firewalling and load balancing using F5 Big IPs. We addressed the solution requirements in their entirety and provided training and migration services on top of hardware, software and extended managed support for the complete infrastructure stack.

As HDS’ largest public sector partner in the UK market, we recognised this as an ideal fit for the HDS Unified Compute Platform. This was an opportunity to introduce a disruptive yet constructive technology, despite the length of relationship with the incumbent technology partner. Our solution provided to Ofsted replaced the entire existing estate as it hurtled past the end of its economic life.

The migration process, which included virtualising over 100 legacy physical servers (including SQL and Exchange clusters), also required the migration of their on-premis datacentre to a secure remote datacentre, all without any business disruption.

Project success leads to opportunity

On completion of the Infrastructure Refresh project, Ofsted engaged with us to develop the platform further by extending the storage layer to a content platform. We are also involved in consulting on the effective use of its infrastructure to achieve delivery of its regulatory and statutory objectives.

XMA’s technical expertise has proved invaluable for helping Lincoln Minster School install a SAN and carry out a server virtualisation project which has given staff and students a much improved service.

“Having an impressive technical team on the end of the phone was very helpful.” That was the verdict of Simon Cornish, network manager at Lincoln Minster School, after XMA helped the school design and deliver a SAN installation and server virtualisation project. In fact, he attributed much of the final success of the project to the company’s ability to offer sound technical advice at every step of the way.

The solution was designed by XMA after the school decided to explore moving towards a modern virtualisation environment during a hardware refresh. Mr Cornish said: “We were refreshing our server infrastructure and we wanted to virtualise it. Previously our servers were old and tired and out of warranty. We knew virtualisation was the way IT was going but we needed help to move forward with the right solution.”

The entire project ran very smoothly. Members of the XMA team were happy to answer
questions about anything we wanted to know about. We were really impressed.

The school, which caters for 900 pupils across three sites, needed XMA’s help to make sure their plans could become an effective reality. Therefore, XMA designed a solution and installed a cost- effective SAN which enabled the school to reduce its server estate from 15 servers to 4.

Why virtual?

The benefits of virtualisation were clear to Lincoln Minster. Mr Cornish said: “This is the way IT is going. By cutting down our servers from fifteen to four, we have reduced our overheads dramatically and it has also made the management of our IT systems much easier as we only have one place to look at all the servers – rather than having to maintain each separately. Thanks to this project, we have refreshed hardware, our operating systems are up to date, we have more power and, generally, we now have in place a faster, more effective system than before.”

Support for the right solution

However, ensuring the school reaped the benefits of a virtualisation solution was not a foregone conclusion. Mr Cornish said: "We have our own technical team but finding people who were at the next level up was essential. One of my aims was to find a solution provider with good technical expertise.

“Today, both staff and students at Lincoln Minster are enjoying the advantages of XMA’s solution which has proved to be value-for-money, as well as reliable and scalable.”

“We were most impressed with XMA’s technical knowledge. From that point of view, it was absolutely brilliant. I couldn’t have asked for anything more at all. It was quickly apparent that XMA staff knew what they were doing and had the knowledge to help
us.”

A personalised solution

Another reason that Lincoln Minster chose XMA to deliver the solution was because the IT provider was happy to create a solution that was fitted to the school's requirements exactly. For example, the school had already chosen to use HP and Microsoft technology – so XMA ensured this preference was factored into the final design.

Mr Cornish said: “Our account manager made an effort to come and sit down with us and find out exactly what our issues were. By doing so, XMA could plan out exactly what we needed. Now we have a solution that fulfils our needs.”

The solution in action

Today, both staff and students at Lincoln Minster are enjoying the advantages of XMA’s solution which has proved to be value-for-money, as well as reliable and scalable. The system can also support much faster backup times and improved disaster recovery. The solution provides redundancy within the SAN solution through two fibre controllers to service the servers and data traffic and three high performance specification servers to manage data requests to the SAN from the school’s network. A storage server was also installed to backup all data from the main SAN.

Mr Cornish said: “Our storage is improved so the service we can offer our students is much better. What’s more, the staff know they can rely on the IT facilities. In the past we have had complaints about the systems performance. That was not an acceptable situation because if the computers are down, teachers cannot deliver lessons to the standard they want, which is a major problem for any modern school. Now we just don’t have these complaints coming in.”

A smooth implementation

He went on: “The entire project ran very smoothly. Members of the XMA team were happy to answer questions about anything we wanted to know about. We were really impressed. They knew their stuff and because of that we would absolutely use XMA again in the future.”

Bridging the divide with HPE

Addressing ever increasing data demands

The Windsor Forest Colleges Group is made up of three college campuses (Windsor, Langley and Egham) all managing different technologies and virtualisation software. Supporting IT for more than one campus and in different locations, presented challenges for the group; with too much physical infrastructure, inconsistent systems, poor service levels and time and resource intensive management.

HPE makes the grade

We worked with the Group to implement an identical 3-node Hyper-V cluster and DPM backup solution into each of the three sites. By integrated best of breed HPE servers and storage, the College gained three major components.

A production environment consisting of a three node Hyper-V cluster with 1024GB RAM and 70TB of shared storage per site that hosted each sites IT services and data, with spare capacity that allows for one site to be replicated to another to form a 3-way mutual Disaster Recovery environment.

A Microsoft System Centre DPM backup solution configured with 60TB usable storage at each site that
provides disk to disk backup for local services and data.

A 3-way mutual disaster recovery environment that allows virtual machines to be replicated between sites
allowing for failover of services should one site become unavailable.

As a result, each site is now able to work independently with local failover clustering and the ability to replicate virtual machines to another site for added resiliency using Hyper-V replica.

Streamlining print operations

The University of Warwick is one of the UK’s great success stories. In less than fifty years since being founded it has become one of the UK’s best universities, consistently at the top of UK league tables and rapidly climbing the international league tables of world class universities. The University has 29,301 students and staff using average annual print volumes of 25 million pages.

After being selected under the Crown Commercial Services RM3781 framework, XMA began working with the University to provide a fully managed print solution. Chris Wood, Printing Services Owner of the University commented “We chose XMA because we felt that they were the most flexible”.

The University had a mixed fleet of 3,800 devices encompassing MFD’s and Desktop Printers. XMA have rationalised these devices, reducing the fleet by 60%. As part of this rationalisation project, XMA also provided a wraparound managed service for the University’s legacy MFD and desktop printers including HP, Samsung and Ricoh devices. Now, staff and students use the Print Management solution across the University, accessed via Mifare smartcards.

The initial requirement was a mix of HP and Kyocera MFD’s coupled with SafeCom Pull Printing and job accounting software in order to provide accurate billing for cost recovery. The second phase of the project was a Document Management Project to digitise information for sharing around the University, which will reduce overall page’ volumes University wide.

Adam Williams, MPS Manager for XMA noted: “With the University we had to adopt a customer led and very fluid approach as each Department had differing print requirements to be supplied through the Kyocera fleet of products”.

Chris continued: “The key for us was to have one user interface across a vast fleet of devices so that we could have support information, documentation, FAQ’s, where there was a real continuity to it and ease of use”.

The fleet has also been supplied with SafeCom pull print management software to reduce costs and meet environmental targets. Users authenticate at the MFD using MiFare smartcard technology.

“The pull print has made a massive difference for us, cutting down on waste. We used to see enormous piles of waste in the recycling bin; we don’t see that anymore. Another massive area for us is mobile print and technologies. That gives our users the ability to send an attachment to a specific mobile print email address, and that attachment will then be sent to their print queue. Use of this has doubled since last term and we expect that to continue.”

Since the initial phases, XMA now work with Warwick University, who also offer their print room services to local businesses in the area. This has created a revenue stream for the University, alongside their £180,000 reduced print costs and tangible environmental savings. Craig Colledge, Print General Manager explained:

“SafeCom gives you financial reporting that we can go back to the Financial Directors and tell them exactly what the cost implications of printing in the University are”.