Lima Networks Helps Schools in Greater Manchester

LIMA Networks Ltd has helped a string of schools in Greater Manchester revamp their shared IT infrastructure.

LIMA was recruited to oversee the project by the Dean Trust, a recently-formed academy trust comprised of three schools sharing a common vision. The trust – which is led by Ashton-on-Mersey School in its capacity as a teaching school – not only has common leadership and governance but is also able to share expertise and resources, including IT infrastructure.

Working with the Dean Trust and Ashton-on-Mersey School, LIMA created a scalable NetApp, Inc.‘s virtual storage system featuring de-duplication technology and a range of applications, providing efficient and powerful data management, replication and restoration.

“LIMA Networks was very hands-on, proactive, and highly professional. It played a pivotal role in deploying our IT infrastructure and solving any issues we had. We have not experienced this level of professionalism in the past,” said Ashton-on-Mersey School IT manager Rashid Mogradia.

Ashton-on-Mersey School approached LIMA with a range of challenges, chief among which was the need to increase IT agility so that it was well-positioned to meet the rapid IT growth anticipated as part of its role in the Dean Trust federation. It also had a dispersed and siloed server sprawl with 30 servers operating at 10% of CPU capacity.

The school needed to see immediate improvements in availability and performance as well as a sharp reduction in costs. Thanks to LIMA, its IT infrastructure was soon revolutionised in order to deliver the required results.

The number of servers was reduced from 30 to just four, with NetApp hardware put in place to provide a storage platform for infrastructure resilience and instant failover. The project also helped to deliver increased flexibility and the capability to scale out both locally and to a wider area, potentially allowing it to host IT services for other schools.