An education in improved storage

Staff and students at Halesowen College now enjoy better IT facilities thanks to a sophisticated storage solution from IT provider XMA.

Keeping up with the speed of technical change can be difficult – particularly for those in the education sector. Here, students rely on being able to take advantage of the latest teaching and learning opportunities for their success. For Will Davidson, technical resources director, at Halesowen College, ensuring the IT services were adequate for the college’s 500 staff, 4,000 full time students and 3,000 part time students was a real challenge.

Recently, one of the greatest issues facing him was how to deliver the increasing levels of storage required to satisfy the college’s users as their IT needs became more sophisticated.

He says: “The college supports a lot of users, which means we have a pretty large requirement for storage. In the past, we’d used direct attached storage but it was starting to become unmanageable. The storage needs of staff and students were growing faster than we could supply them.”
 

To solve the issue, Davidson turned to IT provider XMA to help deliver a solution using Storage Area Network (SAN) technology. Following a lengthy consultation process, XMA installed a SAN based on HP’s MSA 2012.

 

Introducing virtualisation
Davidson explains: “We started talking to suppliers and one of the ideas that came up was using SAN technology. We were also keen to introduce virtualisation to help us streamline servers and support our virtual learning environment (VLE). That meant we needed some shared storage and therefore the SAN.

“Using virtual servers was a way to help us manage our hardware requirements better and reduce the amount we needed. It also meant we could implement disaster recovery more effectively as virtualisation enables us to spread the load across different servers so we always have access to the services we need. We have ‘virtualised’ about ten machines but it’s an ongoing project.”

Responding to users’ needs
The SAN also gave the college a great deal of additional storage space to offer its staff and students. Doing so was particularly important for the college as a strategic aim was to promote the use of IT. Davidson says: “We offer every student some personal disk space. In the past all we could give them was 50meg which is not enough these days. We have IT students developing software and music and media students working with digital media and needing to store very large files securely.

“Some students had used large USB drives but we wanted to offer them a more secure place to hold their files. With the SAN box they now have 200meg each and we want to bring that up to a gig each.”

Help with consultancy
One of the main reasons Davidson choose XMA was for the help the company was able to provide in identifying the best solution.

He says: “Legal requirements mean that I always ask for three quotes for any IT projects and usually one of those comes from XMA. The company has been one of our trusted suppliers for over ten years and we have built up a very good relationship during that time.

”For this project, XMA came up with lots of suggestions catering for different price ranges and needs. We were keen to work with them to identify a solution that met our needs and was on budget as we hadn’t got lots of cash to splash around. XMA came up with the result that could do the job for the price we could afford.”

“It was a very thorough consultation with lots of email dialogue and several face-to-facemeetings.”




A reliable solution

According to Davidson the project, unlike many IT installations, was up and running without any problems. An XMA engineer visited the college’s three sites and spent time making sure staff understood how the solution would work. Davidson says: “The engineer was excellent. He really knew his stuff and was very good value.

“We have got a support agreement with XMA but we haven’t had any problems so we haven’t had any reason to use it. It’s all going exactly as it should be.”

A relationship for the future
The virtualisation project has proved so successful Davidson is keen to continue with it and to maintain his links with XMA. He says: “The company has good processes and the staff offer good service and know what they are talking about.

“I did look at other suppliers but I felt that XMA staff put the most effort in and they bent over backwards to make sure we had what we needed. XMA was prepared to work with us and to do all the digging to find the best solution for us. We didn’t know the answer – and they were a great help with that.”