The London Borough of Sutton has adopted DataCore’s storage vitualisation software to safeguard data. Considered as one of London’s most desirable residential areas, the Borough is a popular choice for families wishing to enjoy the leafy suburbs, safe environment and well maintained public services. Schools are generally therefore popular and oversubscribed.
“We have been using DataCore now for some years, so we have a great track record with the product. However what the new enhanced environment actually gives us is total peace of mind whether we want add, maintain or recover, it simply gets on with job and remains totally bullet proof. That equates to total confidence.”
Centrally supporting the Borough’s 45 primary, special and 12 high schools IT environment, is Daniel Gale, Schools Network Manager, London Borough of Sutton, responsible for providing an effective and secure network and central administration services for over 60,000 pupils and staff. Central infrastructure services that the Team provide include the protection, backup and business continuity of all data relating to schools, pupils, coursework and email.
Previously, the Borough had, been running a SAN (Storage Area Network). The configuration consisted of two administration Microsoft Cluster Server nodes together with a pair of Active Directory Servers, all of which provided failover for the local pool of data. This configuration was great for storage provisioning and adequate for business continuity but to achieve complete disaster recovery, Daniel knew that he needed to employ DataCore’s dual node storage virtualisation software running outside of the local cluster. This would provide the redundant mirroring configuration to avoid a single point of failure and achieve a highly available, highly resilient, stable SAN solution with true disaster recovery. Of further concern was that the existing MS Cluster configuration was over five years old and therefore slow and less reliable than the Team would have liked. With little budget to spend on additional hardware and keen to reutilise what was already in the data centre, Vcentral reassuringly confirmed that they could expand the environment by simply adding DataCore virtualisation software to empower their existing HP MSA 1000 hardware together with deployment of two HP DL380 G5 to house the two DataCore powered nodes to manage their storage across separate sites.
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