Woodland Trust Part 3–the New Building

In my continuing saga on the Woodland Trust I was lucky enough to go to the formal opening of their new building last week.  Unfortunately while all the IT is going smoothly it is the lack of water that is holding up the move, and this means that they can’t bring the new servers online because they are water cooled. 

The data centre may look fairly conventional but only the cabinets are air conditioned not the whole room.

To quite their IT director Lionel Wilson on this..

“If you asked an IT Professional to stop milk from going off they would put the pint in the middle of a room and turn the air con rather than storing it in a fridge". 

BTW those circular things on the right aren’t a bank of speakers, they’re the cooling fans which spin up based on sensors in front of each server rack, and actually sound more like jet engines.

As I have said before sustainability is key part of the new building but despite the high tech look and features in this building it has only cost 10% more than a conventional steel and glass carbuncle of the same size ..

BTW It may seem odd for the Woodland Trust to be using wood the thing they are trying to preserve to make their building but the wood used is sustainable fast growing larch.

However back to I, their 200 users remote desktop services session will run from a cluster of three physical servers. I am pretty sure you couldn’t get that server density from any VDI solution, but the experience is still very good ,each user has dual 24” LED monitors to deliver a rich corporate desktop. The rest of their key services;  Exchange , and their CRM system all run on Hyper-V and are managed by the System Center suite of tools.

I had hoped that Lionel would be on hand to discuss this at IP Expo as his passion and knowledge for sustainable IT makes him an excellent speaker, but the slip in move in dates has prevented that so he has made a short video for the event organisers you can watch here.