Best Practice: Palmer's College, Essex

Would you choose to work direct with a US-based company that had no local representation? Five years ago, probably not – too risky. But for Dan Byne, IT Manager at Palmers College in Essex, that potential risk was outweighed by what he thought he could gain from such a relationship – and in the end, did.

 

Byne says he came across his new supplier after looking at the market in the UK, including talking to market leaders – none of whom could meet his budget requirements. “I basically found them over the Internet, and I’m glad I did,” he says frankly.

 

“This has proven to be easy to use, cheap, was specced up exactly as required and has basically given us exactly what we wanted,” he enthused to PublicTechnology.net.

 

“We’ve ended up with a wholly virtualised infrastructure, reduced admin and disaster recovery as an additional bonus,” he adds. Next steps include a possible move to a VDI (virtualised desktop) scenario for his thousand desktops.

 

Specifically, he and his team chose to work with a technology supplier called Coraid on a new Ethernet SAN storage as part of a large VMware-based datacentre virtualization project.

 

The background to Byne’s decision to work with the supplier was an interest-free loan towards refreshing the 300 year old institution’s IT infrastructure. To capitalise on his opportunity, Byne decided to take the opportunity to virtualise his datacentre to save power and cooling, as he had maxed out the available capacity. Such a move called for new, fast and reliable storage that offered large capacity and scalability and would also allow Palmers, which has 250 staff and 2,200 students, to meet its ambitions going forward.

 

The College was handling 6 Terabytes of data and running 36 servers to support its emails, filing systems, databases and large graphics requirements. Byne and his team of five decided their new storage would need to be affordable, easy to use, reliable, and offer high performance and had to be in within 12 months.

 

It would also need to do the job, of course. Palmer’s College relies on data including emails, file systems, databases and images, most of it subject to data retention regulations (emails and student records must be kept for five years and old students’ work for three years) all of which contribute to a significant growth in storage requirements and management challenges.

 

The solution he’s ended up with encompasses a VMware vSphere server connected to three Coraid devices so as to deliver what he calls a “no-single-point-of-failure” system, backed by 10Gb Ethernet for maximum performance.

 

Post implementation, Byne says he and his team of five have been impressed with the ease of use, performance and reliability of the Ethernet SAN solution. “What took a working week before only takes a day now,” said Byne. “The Ethernet appliances are very fast and the performance/cost and capacity/cost ratios are fantastic,” he says.