Best Practice: Westgate School and Dell

A Berkshire school says it has reduced downtime and realised direct cost savings after investing in a new IT infrastructure that includes virtualised servers, desktop PCs and storage and backup from supplier Dell.

 

The Westgate School in Slough says the new ICT solution will also enhance education, enabling it to satisfy storage requirements for capacity-hungry subjects, in particular A-level Media and the video editing components of A-level IT courses.

 

The School, which has 930 full-time students, two years ago expanded its IT facilities with a modern two-storey technology building. Managers decided it also required technology to support student studies, while accommodating the school’s expansion and infrastructure growth.

 

With the body’s IT storage capacity previously at 80%, routine management tasks such as backup and capacity expansion were becoming difficult and time consuming. “Now every subject has IT incorporated into it and there are more and more subject where the use of IT has expanded,” explains Chris Green, Westgate’s IT manager.

 

The school has moved from physical servers to a fully virtualized infrastructure based on VMware vSphere 4. It has also invested in two Dell EqualLogic PS Series iSCSI storage arrays with built-in replication functionality. This new virtual server environment now runs all of the school’s desktop PCs as well as its critical applications, including SIMS school management software, Equitrac print applications, cashless catering system and remote access facilities and Microsoft Exchange 2010.

 

Deployment of the virtualized environment has reduced downtime and provided direct cost savings by removing the need to invest in additional server hardware. The rollout includes around 200 additional Dell OptiplexTM desktop PC’s and monitors.

 

Green said the set up was chosen because it offered an uncomplicated and scalable infrastructure, allowing the school’s technicians to plan their data usage ahead and still have the flexibility to react to a sudden change in circumstance. “With more efficient server use and a reduction in the hardware we require, the school will quickly see a return on investment; in fact, since the solution has been deployed, we have already avoided having to purchase, configure and deploy two new physical servers.”

 

The virtualized servers allow the school to plan the growth of data consumption in advance and allocate resources to servers based on those plans. But it also provides the flexibility to allocate resources quickly should an application unexpectedly threaten to overload a server. Resiliency is added thanks to replication of data to an offsite location. “One benefit of the offsite SAN is that it’s hosted at a local data centre in Slough via a secure, dedicated line and all the data is transferred overnight,” Green said.

 

Dell and implementation partner Krome Technologies were selected from four quotes for the implementation, principally, Green says, “because Dell was good value for money, and the spec and design was very good. The three year warranty was a big deciding factor,” he says.