Isilon Deployed by West Nottinghamshire College

Isilon Systems, Inc. announced that West Nottinghamshire College, one of the largest providers of post-16 education in the United Kingdom, has deployed Isilon scale-out storage to consolidate its data storage environment, simplifying data management for 26,000 staff and students.

West Nottinghamshire College has 25,000 students and more than 1,150 staff, but only 19 IT staff to manage its server, storage and networking infrastructure. Prior to deploying Isilon, the college’s traditional SAN and NAS systems couldn’t scale in-line with rapid and often unpredictable data growth, complicating data management and limiting the college’s ability to meet student and staff IT needs.  

"Running out of capacity is not an option for us," said Gavin Peake, Director of ICT, West Nottinghamshire College. "What we needed was a solution we could bring online and expand quickly that is suitable for any type of workload. Most importantly, it needed to be incredibly reliable with very low management overhead."

Working with Isilon channel partner Khipu Networks Limited, the college deployed Isilon’s X-Series, powered by the OneFS  operating system, to consolidate its data storage infrastructure onto a single, shared storage resource, eliminating the complex management of its previous storage systems.

"Setting it up took a few hours and provided us with a scalable storage platform from day one," Peake added. "We now have a centralized home space for all our students and staff and the ability to allocate capacity to new projects in just a few minutes."

"Today, universities must often maintain demanding service level agreements for data access, retention and transfer with limited IT staff," said Sam Grocott, vice president of marketing, Isilon. "By deploying Isilon to simplify data management for its staff and students, West Nottinghamshire College is setting best practices for any university looking to more effectively and cost-efficiently manage data growth."