UK Bartholomew School Helped by balesio

Balesio AG, a provider of
native file optimisation solutions for unstructured data, has helped Bartholomew School in Oxford, UK,
to make its storage work smarter and harder by shrinking the size of its
unstructured data.

A mixed comprehensive school with an excellent academic record,
Bartholomew School has been awarded an Ofsted Outstanding School status, a performing
specialist school and a specialist technology college status by the UK
government.

With balesio’s FILEminimizer Server software the school has reduced the overall
amount of data stored on expensive primary storage by nearly 100GB, also
achieving a reduction in backup storage as well as data recovery and restore
times as a result.

According to government legislation, schools must retain students’
work for two years after they have left; with approximately 1,100 students aged
11-18 and 250 staff generating a total average of around 1.5TB of data, the
available storage on the Bartholomew School’s file servers was running close to
maximum capacity and the IT department was finding that it backups took too
long. However the cut backs in education budgets meant that the cost of
additional storage was not viable.

The school decided to combat the growing data volume by tackling the
cause rather than the symptoms and deployed balesio’s Native Format
Optimization (NFO) solution FILEminimizer Server. The software’s capability to
reduce the size of unstructured Microsoft Office, image and PDF files natively
by 50-90% from one central installation was instrumental to the school’s fight against file bloat and unstructured data growth.

Jason Caul, network manager at Bartholomew School, comments: "I was looking at reducing the overall amount
of storage and the duration of backups which, had we not utilised
FILEminimizer, could and probably would have undermined user access to the
network and their data. Having searched around and tested
many different products, I selected FILEminimizer because of its performance,
cost, and functionality."

Shortly after balesio’s technology was deployed, the school saw a
reduction in its primary storage requirements.

For Caul the advantages were
clear: "FILEminimizer Server is so
simple to install and use, I believe that it should be considered an essential
piece of software for all network managers to keep in their arsenal."

Christoph Schmid, COO at balesio,
added: "A growing number of
educational institutions are learning about the benefits offered by our
innovative NFO technology. Network managers across the public sector now
realise that there is an easy, quick and cost-effective way to make their
storage work smarter and that is by eliminating unnecessary ‘bloat’ in
unstructured data."

Caul concludes: "The best
thing about balesio’s FILEminimizer Server software is that it can handle all
our main file types so it is all we need to tackle data growth. I would
recommend this software to anyone who needs to contain large amounts of
storage."