News Story

KMi project wins Storage Award at annual event

Robbie Bays, Monday 22 Jun 2015

The OU-led digital initiative MK:Smart was successful at the 22nd annual Storage Awards, held at the prestigious Grand Connaught Rooms in London. The MK Data Hub was nominated (and won!) in the “Best Storage Solution” category for its “Data protection project”, this was built in conjunction with NCE Europe, Arcserve and CMS Distribution. Attending and receiving the award was staff from NCE, Arcserve and CMS and from KMi representing the Open University was Paul Alexander, Jane Whild and Jai Gadhvi.

“It’s pleasing to both be nominated and successful in receiving the award”, noted Technical Operations Lead of the Data Hub Technical Operations (DTOP) Paul Alexander. “The work put in by the team to build the MK data hub was immense, with everyone working long hours in a short space of time to get it up and running. So it’s especially pleasing for their efforts to be recognised and I’m keen for us to take this forward as a motivational tool to gain more success”.

The MK Data Hub infrastructure is at the heart of the project, running in central Milton Keynes. It supports the acquisition and management of vast amounts of data relevant to city systems from a variety of sources, such as local and national open data repositories; data streams from both key infrastructure networks (energy, transport, water) and other relevant sensor networks (e.g., weather and pollution data); satellite data; data crowdsourced from social media or through specialised apps; and others.