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Three Cambridgeshire colleges unite to adopt virtualisation technology to reduce costs and drive down energy consumption.

 

Three educational institutions in Cambridgeshire have selected virtualisation and cloud computing specialist Intercept to optimise their IT infrastructure. In choosing VMware vSphere4 released in the UK in June, the colleges aim to leapfrog earlier evolutions of the software to adopt the industry’s first cloud operating system. The aim is cut their costs and carbon footprint by around 75%, and improve business processes. The announcement is a positive development for the education sector; as it is often considered slow to embrace new technologies.

 

St Bede’s Inter-Church School, City of Ely Community College and Bottisham Village College combined to ensure best value and facilitate a skills transfer from specialist Intercept to the colleges’ IT staff. Both Ely and Bottisham have existing traditional server infrastructures that have been deemed inefficient and costly, while St Bede’s is in need of much more server capacity and is effectively a new project requiring the complete implementation of a new infrastructure.

 

David Knappett, ICT Manager at St Bede’s believes the move provides the schools with greater agility: “Intercept has allowed our school to maximise the use of the IT estate, while also enhancing our service offering to our many end-users. Adopting virtualisation enables us to enjoy long-term flexibility benefits as well by making any future changes or improvements much easier. We will also have the added bonus of not having to buy servers as often, and therefore not spend as much time maintaining them,” says David.

The main challenge for the schools was identifying technology that enabled cutting edge solutions, greater flexibility and at minimal costs. With so many users across the organisations, the educational institutions decided to unite in an attempt to gain greater purchasing power and drive down costs for the 3,500 users across the three schools.

 

“The technology helps release the service bottleneck that was becoming increasingly damaging and minimises the time spent maintaining our servers. Now the existing physical servers have been replaced with 3 new hosts, we can increase the number of servers, without increasing the space needs to house them. This will help achieve our desired green gains in power and cooling reduction while reducing costs. The aim is to speed up the entire network, make it more reliable and vastly improve the end user experience.”

 

The projects will be completed by Intercept, the London based virtualisation and cloud computing specialist. Nigel Woods, Technical Director at Intercept believes the project will become a role model for other education bodies considering migrating to virtualisation technology.

 

“Education establishments often spend long periods of time between technology updates, leaving them with legacy servers languishing at suboptimal usage rates. Virtualisation allows greater use to be made of the resources these organisations have already invested in, as well as offering better analysis and control of their future IT spending. We won the tender on the basis of delivering greater IT use and consequent savings through employing virtualisation techniques, as well as by demonstrating a measurable return on investment within the public sector,” says Nigel.