Bull Infrastructure Solutions for Higher Education

Bull's Infrastructure Solutions and Services pride ourselves as an independent systems integrator, and have the highest level of accreditation with all the main technology hardware and software manufacturers.

We fully recognise that technology is not a means to an end in itself, but must be coupled with experience and expertise, innovation, advice, and a full understanding of - and alignment to - an institution's strategy and overall goal. Our infrastructure services offer complete technical solutions to problems that often seem complex and insurmountable. Using our tried and tested methodology for specifying and project managing, we enable our academic, administrative, and research customers address their challenges, and transform campus computing along with driving unprecedented levels of efficiency and flexibility. Our solutions will integrate seamlessly with your current estate, and look at ways to maximise and leverage your existing investment in architecture and knowledge. In doing so, we gain the full confidence of those outside, who sometimes view IT as a constant stream of expense with little visible gain.

Most Institutions have a core infrastructure that extends across the whole of the enterprise. Managing the infrastructure needs to be a careful balance of cost, manageability, flexibility, scalability, security, and performance. The IT infrastructure should be architected to be fit for purpose and to be robust, reliable, and resilient. It must adequately support the present needs of the institution and be capable of development to support likely future institutional requirements.

The following is an overview of our solution portfolio. Following commissioning of any of our solutions, we will continuously work with you to ensure that the provision continues to be relevant and meets the needs of the institution, staff, and students alike.

• Infrastructure optimisation and consolidation.
  • Server, Storage, Network, Power, and Cooling.
• Infrastructure Virtualisation.
  • Server, Storage, Network, and Desktop.
  • Thin Client, and Thin Provisioning, de-duplication.
• Cloud Computing.
  • Private and Public.
• Service orientated architectures.
• Tiered and unified data storage solutions.
• Backup and Recovery for the DataCentre, remote office, end users and students.
  • Physical, Virtual, Disk, and Tape.
• Archiving.
  • Full archiving options for all applications for either compliance, or ease of management and cost reduction.
• Transactional and content management.
  • Electronic Post Rooms, automated accommodation and housing, print management, workflow.
• Disaster recovery and availability solutions.
• Management and reporting.
• Email, messaging, and collaborative solutions.
• Single Sign-on solutions.
• High Performance Computing (HPC) Bull Extreme Computing (Bull-X).
• Compliance, security, and Campus CCTV solutions.

With technology playing an ever-increasing role within Higher Education, the importance of well designed and implemented service continuity solutions has become far more important than ever before. Long term institutional strategy and user demand for higher availability is forcing disaster recovery to become a critical part of infrastructure planning. Bull has successfully developed and implemented numerous integrated continuity plans that have been designed to recover crucial business functions, easily, quickly and cost effectively.

Upon completing the requirement and design phase with our customers, Bull selects the best partners to engage with to deliver the solution. We have very good and longstanding relationship with our partners, some of whom include the following: -

Bull also manufacturer HPC solutions and UNIX Servers, co-develop AIX with IBM, and are a major supporter and supplier of OpenSource solutions.

All our solutions can also be supplied as part of a managed or shared service or as part of Bull Financial Services BFS.

Bull is a supplier on the NSSA framework agreement with our partner EMC.