Set in the shadow of the Ochil Hills, the University of Stirling’s magnificent 330-acre campus encompasses a loch, a golf course and the 18th-century Airthrey Castle. The university was founded by Royal Charter in 1967 and is located two miles from Stirling – a city which is dramatically positioned at the country’s geographic heart where Highland meets Lowland Scotland.

The university campus has had significant power outages in the past, although nothing lasting longer than an hours’ duration during the last 15 years. In recent years, the estate services team have dramatically improved the substations serving the campus. While this has generally helped increase the availability of the data centres, short power losses and brownouts were still being experienced. The availability of IT services is mission critical as any outage would leave the university’s 10,000 students and 2000 staff unable to do their work.

Alan Richardson is a pragmatist, he says: “The supply of power is the biggest issue because if you lose power to your data centre, there’s not a great deal you can do about delivering services.”