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World-Class School Modernises IT Infrastructure and Improves DR with SimpliVity
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Applicable Industries
- Education
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Infrastructure Inspection
- Remote Asset Management
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
Southbank International School, an international independent school for 3 to 18 year-olds in the heart of London, was facing challenges with its outdated IT server architecture. The school's aging IT infrastructure was becoming increasingly unreliable, costly, and slow. The school relied on a mix of legacy server and storage systems distributed across three campuses, serving approximately 1000 users. Many of the systems were over ten years old and simply could not meet the performance demands of contemporary applications. Administering the fragmented environment was a resource-intensive, time-consuming undertaking involving several distinct management systems. Deploying new applications—allocating compute and storage resources—took days. Even worse, hardware failures were frequently disrupting core classroom applications. The school relied on manual data backup and recovery processes. It took hours or days to restore services as disks were copied, transported across campus and swapped out.
About The Customer
Southbank International School is an international independent school for 3 to 18 year-olds located in the heart of London. The school serves approximately 1000 users across three campuses. The school's IT infrastructure was outdated and unreliable, with many of the systems being over ten years old. The school relied on a mix of legacy server and storage systems that were unable to meet the performance demands of contemporary applications. The administration of the fragmented environment was resource-intensive and time-consuming, involving several distinct management systems. The deployment of new applications took days, and hardware failures frequently disrupted core classroom applications. The school relied on manual data backup and recovery processes, which took hours or days to restore services.
The Solution
Southbank International School replaced its outdated IT server architecture with SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure. The SimpliVity solution helps the school streamline IT operations, reduce TCO, and ensure high performance and availability for its administrative systems, classroom applications and virtual learning solutions. SimpliVity’s hyperconverged infrastructure solution is specifically designed to meet the increased performance, scalability and agility demands of today’s data intensive, highly virtualized IT environments. The solution eliminates cost and complexity by consolidating a variety of IT functions—including compute, storage, network switching, replication, and backup—onto virtualized, industry-standard x86 hardware, with global unified management. Southbank implemented a fully redundant configuration for ultimate availability and data protection. The school replaced an entire rack of distributed legacy equipment with two 2U SimpliVity OmniCube nodes in its primary data center. Applications and data are backed up locally for business continuity, and to a third OmniCube node locally on site for disaster recovery.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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