Rob, Julie and Adel were lucky enough to go to Amsterdam to have a tour of the Blackboard (the product underpinning NILE) offices and data centre where our servers are housed.
The trip involved a morning of meetings with Blackboard staff and representatives from Bath Spa, and Birmingham University at the the Blackboard offices which are based near Dam Square the in the heart of Amsterdam. Jan-Willem Van der Zalm (Director EMEA, Managed Hosting at Blackboard) lead the discussion where we talked about the service they provide and where their roadmap will be taking the service in the future.
The meeting confirmed many of the reasons why we pay Blackboard to provide this service. It includes everything from systems monitoring, security and backups to front line support, project planning, and handling of upgrades. With all of this handled by Blackboards team of experts, and service level agreements in place guaranteeing 99.9% uptime, we can concentrate on supporting staff and students in using technology to enhance their teaching and learning practice.
The Blackboard servers are housed in an Equinix Data Centre where the security just to get in was like something out of ’24’, requiring passports, pre-booking and a registered user whose finger prints are recorded. We had a tour of the facility including a room containing 5 generators which can keep power going into the centre for 51 hours without needing a fuel top up. The Data Centre is a sophisticated building with millions being invested in the continued maintenance, security provision and safety of the equipment and data held within its walls.
We finished the tour by going into the Blackboard ‘cage’. Some of the Blackboard servers are run from this relatively new area where there is a lot of space available for expansion. There are other Data Centres containing Blackboard servers in Virginia, USA and Sydney, Australia. The Blackboard Data Centre/Infrastructure engineer gave us an enthusiastic overview of the set up within the cage demonstrating the physical structure of an otherwise virtual system.
The whole visit gave us a clearer understanding and appreciation of the work that goes on behind the scenes to support and maintain NILE. Pretty good value as far as we’re concerned.
