Some of you may be interested in how we have spent the Computing budget for 2010/2011. If you have any questions, please ask.

Capital Expenditure

• Desktops (£90,000) – replacing 170 elderly and unreliable desktops and adding an additional 24 desktops to the Appleton Tower teaching labs. The new desktops are more capable of being put to sleep, which will help us meet our energy reduction target.
• Storage (£44,000) – purchasing new storage arrays to replace our oldest arrays, one of which is 8 years old.  This will improve reliability by allowing us to use a more robust RAID level (10 instead of 5), address the AFS performance issues we’ve been experiencing, give us some degree of expansion space for growing user needs, reduce our energy footprint and reduce our hardware maintenance bill. It also allows us to improve the performance of our virtualisation infrastructure.
• Servers (£36,000) – expanding our virtualisation infrastructure (so that we can reduce the number of physical servers) and replacing elderly energy inefficient servers for those services unsuited to virtualisation.
• Network (£17,500) – replace the network switches in AT levels 3,4,5. The previous switches were purchased when we relocated to AT following the South Bridge fire and have been unsupported by HP for some time. The new switches will reduce our energy footprint and give us some 1GB to the desktop capacity.
• Printers (£2,000) – replacing a couple of very old printers in AT.

Annual recurrent expenditure

• EdLAN (£9,700) – the cost of our connections to the University network (at the Forum, AT and KB), both physical and wireless
• Storage array maintenance (£8,400) – the cost of hardware and software maintainance for our storage arrays. This will be lower in 2011/2012.
• Matlab (£3,300) – licence fee
• Tibs maintenance (£3,000) – licence fee for the backup software we use for file servers and self managed machines
• Apple o/s maintenance (£1,800) – for users’ Apple desktops and laptops
• Tape library maintenance (£2,200) – hardware maint for our old tape library which has now been decommissioned
• Allegro Common Lisp (£1,600) – licence fee
• SICTUS Prolog (£500) – licence fee

Spending of Computing Budget in 2010/2011 / Computing Systems by is licensed under a