St Mary Redcliffe & Temple School Turns to NetApp

A school with roots stretching back to the Middle
Ages, St Mary Redcliffe & Temple is the only Church of England Voluntary
Aided Secondary School in the city of Bristol. With 1,500 students and 120
members of staff, it has always aimed to rise above the ordinary by developing
a rounded education that can transform lives and communities.

The Challenge:
Before the move to a new VMware and NetApp based
virtual environment, Alastair Cairns, Network Manager at St Mary Redcliffe
& Temple School, says he and his team were struggling to deliver the service he knew his organisation needed: "We were always moving
chunks of data round to fit where they could," he says, which he
characterises as a process that: "was all very time consuming and which
also meant we were offline a lot". Something had to change.

An outdated server overhead finally warranted an
exploration of new technology options, says Cairns, a situation that led to a market evaluation of a more modern SAN. As part of
this discovery process Cairns connected with virtualisation
specialist, S3 Consulting. S3 Consulting recommended a technology stack
based on NetApp as the core component as being most appropriate for the
customer’s complex storage requirements.

The Solution:
Utilising funding from a UK government
initiative to help upgrade infrastructure in English and Welsh schools, Cairns
and his team constructed a business case which showed that a move to a
virtualised environment made the most sense as a way to combat the challenges
the current environment faced. So taking the opportunity of the short Easter
2010 break, Cairns initiated a move to a  new environment based on
NetApp, using the delivery of partner S3 Consulting. The project met this deadline and has resulted in an alternative that was able to go-live with the minimum
of disruption to the School’s running.

Business Benefits:
"We now
have a two-tier storage architecture that has given us excellent disaster
recovery and resilience, as well as the usual benefits a move to virtualised
storage can offer," says Cairns.

Citing the professional and technically competent approach taken by the S3 Consulting team, he also believes
change management was not an issue in the transition to the new environment – a
vital consideration in a busy school.

Cairns is impressed with the
de-duplication that came as part of the change in environment. "We had the
ability to dedupe out of the box with NetApp and I am very pleased to say that
as a result space has either been saved or created."

The move to the virtual
structure has upped the institution’s Green credibility, allowing the School’s
leaders to meet an local benchmark for making changes to
business to help fight climate change.

"When people ask me about the move to virtual
storage, I say that for us it just worked, I see the £58,000 investment we made
with NetApp to have been very much worth it as we have achieved multiple
results and benefits, some of which we hadn’t anticipated at the outset," said
Alastair Cairn.

Solution Components


NetApp FAS 2020A
12x300Gb SAS disks
De-duplication
Thin provisioning
Snapshot
RAID-DP
Virtualisation
De-duplication
Green IT
iSCSI, NAS
Scale-out storage
VMware vSphere

2nd shelf with 14x1TB SATA disks