Dr Phil Richards from Loughborough University headed into The Reg studios on October 20th to tell us how he's building modular hybrid clouds.

Dr Richards has recognised numerous challenges with ageing data centres, some of which you'll recognise and some of which you won't. One of them was that doing things the old way - where academics were building their own mini-datacentres under their desks - was simply unsustainable. Then there's that tiny issue of keeping IT on track with new requirement, response and efficiency demands.

Obviously, academia doesn't have the kind of cash swilling around that some corporates have so Dr Richards took a fresh approach and thought why should I build fixed data centre infrastructure in the old style when I could implement a modular approach to IT? Is it effective to build out a network infrastructure to handle all workloads, rather than build what’s needed most of the time and look outside to handle the extra when required? We won't give the game away by telling you the answers Dr Richards came up with, you'll need to view the broadcast which is now avaiable on-demand. But suffice to say, it's a damned interesting success story that might get you thinking about the challenges you've got on your plate.

The Register's Jon Collins hosted the show and he was joined by Dr Richards, obviously, Andrew Buss from our old friends at Freeform Dynamics. And experts from two of the teams that we're pivotal in the success of these initiatives for Loughborough - Laurence James, from NetApp, and Chris Gabriel from Logicalis.

This free,1hr broadcast promises to show you how other worlds are dealing with their technology challenges, embracing clouds and, arguably, making JANET one of the key cloud backbones for the UK.

You can now get the on-demand version of this event here.