Schneider Electrical and its EcoXpert Companion, Superior Energy Expertise (APT), have delivered a cutting-edge, information centre modernisation undertaking on the Queen Mary College of London – one of many world’s prime 100 universities.
Collectively, the businesses have created a platform for warmth restoration on the College’s information centre, enabling waste warmth from the power to be linked to a campus-wide district heating community, offering heating and sizzling water for the buildings and scholar lodging close by.
The undertaking not solely reduces the campuses scope 1 CO2 emissions in step with Queen Mary’s sustainability objectives however has additionally allowed it to cut back the prices of its vitality payments. Additional, the brand new vitality environment friendly information centre has supplied the College with elevated resiliency and processing energy for its on-premises, large-scale analysis and intensive computing functions, serving to it to provision for future growth.
World-leading analysis
Queen Mary College of London is ranked 94th on the earth within the 2025-26 version of the US Information and World Report Greatest International Universities rankings, and immediately has over 32,000 college students from over 170 nationalities and 5,700 workers – with at least 9 Nobel Prize winners amongst its former workers and college students.
It’s dedicated to conducting world-leading analysis and adheres to the ideas of sustainable growth throughout all areas of its operational and educational actions. Its imaginative and prescient is to create and oversee the evolution of a large-scale distributed computing infrastructure wanted to take care of the UK’s place as a world chief in particle physics.
As such, it’s a participant within the Grid for Particle Physics (GridPP) undertaking, a collaborative effort amongst particle physicists, pc scientists, and engineers to analyse information generated by high-energy physics experiments, comparable to these performed on the world-famous Giant Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.
The dimensions, scale, and significance of this work implies that the College should function and keep a extremely environment friendly, on-premises information centre – guaranteeing it meets the technical necessities of present and
future analysis developments, particularly these requiring Excessive Throughput Computing (HTC) functions.
Legacy challenges
Previous to the modernisation undertaking, Queen Mary’s information centre was experiencing reliability, scalability, and availability points, which required guide on-site interventions to repair. It was additionally changing into outdated, and its operations have been, at occasions, impacted because of a build-up of warmth in its server racks from its inefficient cooling techniques.
Future analysis computing might also have been hindered because of the information centre’s internet hosting limitations. The refresh was, subsequently, very important to enhance and stabilise day-to-day operations, and its proximity to the campus’ district heating community introduced a possibility for a brand new answer be designed and applied to carry the info centre in step with the College’s sustainability objectives.
Resolution – a catalyst for sustainability
Schneider Electrical’s information centre, energy and cooling options have been already put in throughout Queen Mary’s property, so when it got here to the plans to improve its operations, the College straight sought assist from Schneider Electrical’s accomplice ecosystem.
Schneider Electrical’s long-standing EcoXpert Companions, Superior Energy Expertise (APT), a number one unbiased provider of energy-efficient important energy and cooling techniques, was chosen to assist Queen Mary meet its formidable modernisation and sustainability objectives.
Key to the technique was the combination of elements together with Schneider Electrical’s EcoStruxure Row Knowledge Centre answer – a pre-engineered, extremely configurable, and scalable system, encompassing racks, energy, cooling and administration. It additionally integrated APCä NetShelter Racks, APC NetBotz environmental monitoring gear, InRow cooling and EcoStruxureä Knowledge Centre Professional software program – offering full visibility and real-time monitoring for higher effectivity and reliability.
The brand new configuration supplied by APT not solely delivered a extra vitality environment friendly cooling answer however straight enabled the warmth restoration to help the College’s sustainability technique – permitting Queen Mary to switch waste warmth and reuse it straight for heating and sizzling water throughout varied buildings together with scholar lodging, through a district heating system.
Outcomes
Because of the work by Schneider Electrical and APT, Queen Mary has developed a extremely resilient analysis information centre that has elevated its processing energy, is extra vitality environment friendly, and has helped it provision for future growth.
It has considerably elevated the reliability and availability of its analysis information and each the techniques’ day-to-day operations and upkeep are extra automated – requiring much less guide intervention to maintain the working at full capability all yr spherical. The college can be planning to maneuver server gear from throughout the campus into the brand new information centre, offering extra advantages together with elevated reliability, decreased prices and enhanced vitality effectivity.
Talking on the success of the undertaking, Professor Jonathan Hays, Queen Mary College of London mentioned, “The help we have had from APT and Schneider Electrical has been unparalleled. Each firms got here collectively to assist us develop an thrilling and revolutionary undertaking which might allow us to provision for the long run. The most important influence is that we have been in a position to ship on what we promised whereas enhancing our sustainability. The brand new information centre is extra dependable and environment friendly than ever, and thru the warmth restoration, now we have considerably decreased our spending on heating and sizzling water, whereas gaining enhanced reputational advantages from taking a lead on sustainability inside our information centre operations.”
“The undertaking at Queen Mary demonstrates how digital infrastructure is usually a catalyst for web zero, permitting immediately’s organisations to learn from the facility of superior computing,” mentioned Mark Yeeles, Vice President, Safe Energy division, Schneider Electrical UK & Eire. “By combining revolutionary engineering with sustainable information centre options, the college has developed an enhanced infrastructure platform that can meet its analysis computing necessities, whereas supporting its sustainability technique.”
“Schneider Electrical’s EcoStruxure Knowledge Centre options have been important to assist Queen Mary carry collectively its energy, cooling, racks and administration techniques, and help the deployment of its high-density IT gear wanted for its analysis,” mentioned John Andrew, Technical Gross sales Supervisor, APT. “This strategy additionally created a platform to help its sustainability aims through warmth reuse, whereas enabling the College to behave proactively and preventatively to intercept and remediate potential future points.”
