Pennsylvania Trade School Opts for Scale Computing

Scale Computing, Inc., in hyper-converged storage, server and virtualization solutions for midsized companies, announced that the Reading Muhlenberg Career & Technology Center (RMCTC) has deployed its HC3 virtualization platform to replace an aging storage infrastructure that had led to as much as a 90% loss of mission-critical data.

RMCTC provides career and technical education programming to secondary high school students living in the Muhlenberg and Reading, Pennsylvania school districts and adult students. The school brought in Dipal Kapadia as its IT administrator to evaluate its failing infrastructure. RMCTC’s storage servers were 5 to 6 years old and had not been upgraded by its outside contractor in some time. The networking backend was more than 10 years old. Its Exchange server was corrupted, as were backups, which inhibited any successful recovery efforts. VMware licenses had lapsed. Only the school’s accounting system, which was on a separate server, remained operational. With a new school year starting, RMCTC needed a quick-and-easy solution to ensure it could continue to meet its educational mandates.

“There was no way we could have done anything with the hardware we had – we couldn’t move forward,” said Kapadia. “We were in a position where budget was a concern but wasn’t a concern because we were losing everything. To have things running, we had to get something or we weren’t going to have anything. Scale gives us everything. When we saw what Scale could provide, it was a no-brainer that we had to go with it in order to recover everything in the time frame we had to work with.“

RMCTC implemented HC3 platform, which brings storage, servers, virtualization and HA together in a single system. With no virtualization software to license and no external storage to buy, HC3 solutions lower out-of-pocket costs and simplify the infrastructure needed to keep applications optimized and running.

Additionally, the school will soon be leveraging Scale’s latest SSD platform for faster performance and tiering benefits while keeping its current cluster in place to serve as another layer of redundancy, giving the school ‘multiple backups of multiple backups.’

“Every organization relies on the quality and availability of its data to remain operationally effective and when that information is gone, it can be a difficult situation to recover from,” said Jeff Ready, CEO and co-founder, Scale Computing. “RMCTC needed a fresh start and found that our HC3 virtualization platform was perfectly suited to provide them with a replacement to their aging infrastructure with the simplicity, availability, capacity and performance they needed to ensure that they were able to continue to provide quality education to their student body.“