A huge well done to Data Centre Manager, Stuart Atkins, who is now a Certified Data Centre Energy Professional. The qualification, which is accredited by CNet, is the equivalent of a BTEC Level 5 or two years of a Bachelor Degree.
Stuart intends to use his newly gained knowledge to review the power train of the whole Data Centre in order to find efficiency savings without reducing capacity or requirements. This will not only help us save money but will also reduce our carbon footprint.
As Stuart is the only person within the University to hold this qualification, he also hopes to use his training to review energy usage across the entire estate and to provide advice on how we better manage our energy consumption at the University.
This is the third CNet Data Centre qualification that Stuart has been awarded in the last two years having previously received his Certified Data Centre Design Professional and Certified Data Centre Management Professional awards.
Elsewhere, staff from IT Services have been busy completing their ITIL Practitioner Certification. Faith Thomas and Shawn Smith from Service Management, Chris Broomfield and Lydia Rea from App Ops and Ian Fensome from End User Services have all recently received their qualification.
It was the second time Faith had attempted the ITIL Practitioner and she admits it was very tough. However, despite the difficulty, Faith is confident that she can apply the practical knowledge she has gained, particularly around communications and organisational change, to her Introduction Specialist role to make sure new services are introduced as smoothly as possible.
Likewise, Shawn thought the training was really beneficial and not only reinforced the theory he had learned from Foundation but also gave some really handy practical tools to apply to his work at the Service Desk.
In App Ops, Chris and Lydia were also both really happy to have passed their ITIL exam and have no doubts about the positive impact of the training, stating that the continual service improvement methodologies they have learned will almost certainly help them improve the quality of the services they provide.