Virtualisation in Education Case Study

Lawnswood School

Lawnswood is a mixed comprehensive Mathematics and Computing specialist school based in Leeds.

The School has around 1600 students that use the curriculum network’s 400 PC’s for a range of cross curricular ICT activities.

Project: Virtualisation of Servers

Background

Coniston have supported Lawnswood’s IT system for several years and have been involved with projects such as network management, remote access and Exchange.
For further development of the School’s systems, IT Manager Noel Reynolds wished to provide more flexibility, greater fault tolerance and reduce overall operating costs. Coniston worked with Lawnswood to meet these aims and implemented a virtualisation solution.

The Solution

VMware Virtual Infrastructure was deployed with a Storage Area Network (SAN) back end. The School has thus been able to consolidate around 20 physical servers of varying ages into two new servers which have full fault tolerance and the ability to move a running server to another physical server to precipitate maintenance without any discernible impact on users.

The platform allows for the easy addition of extra servers – a matter of minutes rather than days as well as reduced costs for licensing, power, cooling and hardware warranties.

Coniston’s VMware Certified Professionals implemented the project with minimal downtime and within the agreed timeframe

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