Framwellgate School

Challenge

Framwellgate School Durham, located just outside of the historic city of Durham in the North East of England is a science and sixth form college for 11-18 year olds. At that time they were running two standalone ESXi servers on existing shared storage with 6 SATA disks. Aegis IT began working with the school on a requested virtualisation project. IT manager Peter Cook was looking to deploy VMware to provide high availability and central management.

The school also wanted to lay the foundations for a move to virtual desktops in the future. Aegis IT recommended a change in SAN technology to provide a system that was both expandable and could provide the different types of disks required for both server and desktop virtualisation in one chassis. Aegis IT introduced the Huawei OceanStor S2600 technology to fulfil all of the requirements.

Solution

The key to the virtualisation project was a stable and reliable storage platform as all main IT systems would be dependent on it. The OceanStor S2600 fitted this perfectly because although the school had a large number of desktops, storage and server requirements were moderate. A VMware Essentials Plus bundle and two servers were purchased to complete the components required. The solution delivered strong technical and commercial argument for the present and the future; the OceanStor S2600 in partnership with VMware and Aegis IT’s skills has delivered a highly available system at an affordable cost.

As a large portion of the school’s existing data and servers were held on single servers and the existing SAN, a number of physical and virtual conversions were carried out by Aegis IT to transfer the servers and data to the S2600. The S2600 was configured with dual ISCSI (4 x1GB Ports per controller) controllers and a 50/50 split between SATA and SAS disks for servers and future desktops respectively. This provided resilience and high performance. The ease of configuration and use were noted by all.

Value

Since the implementation everyday management and performance has meant users enjoying a robust and reliable system and IT staff can carry out maintenance work during working hours thanks to VMware’s Vmotion technology and the OceanStor S2600 shared storage.