Scale Computing enables Sweyne Park School to reduce IT costs and simplify data centre management

Previously, the school was running its IT environment on VMware with Hitachi storage hardware AMS. However, the solution was reaching its end of life, and with service parts unavailable, the school decided to upgrade early in order to minimise downtime and the disruption to staff and students.

After discussing services, performance and price objectives with reseller Neuways, the school decided to opt for a hyperconverged platform and evaluated options from Dell Vertex and Nutanix before deciding on Scale Computing. After running a successful proof of concept, the school chose to deploy Scale Computing’s HC3 cluster with future plans for a secondary cluster for replication, backup and disaster recovery.

As a school, it was critical that migration from the existing environment did not disturb its day-to-day operations. With this in mind, Neuways supported the school throughout the implementation, and within three weeks, the school had transferred or recreated 37 virtual machines. 

Sweyne Park School now benefits from high performance with simplified infrastructure management and more space in its rack. The school has also seen a cost saving in electricity bills due to lower power consumption of the HC3 platform compared to the previous AMS solution, which had two additional trays taking up 12U in the cabinet together with three 2U servers.

“Scale Computing’s solution is perfect for us. School budgets are restricted so finding a solution that could offer us the performance, scalability and flexibility for our needs at a price point that worked for us was great” commented Dan Joslin, Systems Manager for Rayleigh Schools Trust, including Sweyne Park School. “The solution gives us peace of mind as it runs with minimal management. This time and the cost-saving enables us to increase resources elsewhere in the school.”

Michelle Catterall, Business Development Director at Neuways, part of the Neustro Group commented, “Sweyne Park School is a longstanding client of ours and we fully understand the challenges they are facing as a large school with a restricted budget. We are pleased to work with Scale Computing and have the HC3 platform within our portfolio because it fits perfectly with schools like Sweyne Park School and other organisations that are looking to utilise budgets as effectively as possible. The HC3 platform offers excellent performance, scalability and flexibly at a price point that works on a budget, meaning organisations like Sweyne Park School don’t have to compromise.”

“We are very happy to have enabled the school to utilise its budget as effectively as possible, and in the best way for its students. Many organizations are looking to reduce growing IT costs but without compromising on availability, performance and management,” commented Johan Pellicaan, VP and MD EMEA at Scale Computing.