Woodrush High School Chose Qsan and Trustco

Woodrush High School is an academy for students aged from 11-18.

In Worcestershire, UK, the academy is committed to ensuring their students receive the education that they deserve. With 1,000 students and 130 staff, who rely on the computer systems, the organisation is heavily dependent on their IT systems for most day to day tasks.

Woodrush High School has been partnering with Trustco plc on a variety of IT infrastructure projects since 2012 and so when it came to updating its outdated SAN solution, Peter Coates, IT technician, turned to Trustco to help advise him on the best and most cost-effective options available.

The existing SAN was slow, undersized and no longer delivering the performance required, as well as starting to become unreliable with age. Gavin Bennison, senior account manager, Trustco, worked closely with Coates to help define his project drivers from the start.

The school required a resilient SAN solution which would: 

• Improve on the performance of the previous solution to help support the school as its infrastructure and estate continues to grow
• Be easy to operate and manage
• Be future proof and allow for a simple and cost-effective expansion as and when required
• Meet budget requirements

Coates says: “We are a small, hands-on team who are and do not always have the time to research every new technology on the market. Trustco works with us to define our challenges and then go through a full review, design consultation to develop a solution that meets our needs.“

At Trustco’s recommendation, Woodrush previously purchased a basic QSAN NAS to address file storage capacity issues. They were so impressed with the device and technology that it made sense to consider QSAN’s XCubeSAN series for the SAN replacement. After doing the required due diligence and receiving alternative proposals and quotations from other suppliers, the QSAN solution proposed by Trustco was selected by the school governors as it provided the desired features and performance required as well as coming in at a competitive price-point.

QSAN is a manufacturer of enterprise storage solutions based in Taiwan with UK commercial and technical teams. With its own proprietary hardware and software, its solutions provide performance, reliability, and cost-effectiveness to businesses in more than 30 countries around the world.

The QSAN XCubeSAN XS3216D offered Woodrush a resilient solution, with active-active mode dual controllers, redundant fan modules, and power supplies, dedicated hot spares, auto volume rebuilding, rapid RAID rebuilding, network port failover/failback as well as file and block level snapshot, remote replication, and cloning features.

Coates added: “Our IT team trust Trustco’s recommendations and this gives us the confidence to explore new solutions as we know they will be a good fit for the school“.

Evaluation
Trustco and QSAN set up a web demonstration, which allowed Coates to log in at any time from anywhere to explore all the features. He loved the GUI, he could set up storage pools and arrays, workout disks capacities and RAID configurations all from his desk. This allowed him to review speed, reliability, and resilience of the solution before purchasing.

After review, the order was placed and the SAN was delivered the following week, configured from the factory, ready to plug in. The solution intuitive and the installation was completed by Coates with technical support on hand if he required this.

Outcomes

• High resilience: Dual controllers and redundant hardware offer peace of mind taking away single point of failure, allowing the school to have a highly available storage platform to support internal SLAs. With hardware RAID error checking is being done in real time, this is a feature normally found only on high-end NAS/SAN or dedicated server controller cards.
• Future proofing through scalability: Expandable to over 2PB of storage via a pay as you grow model and with the QSAN modular system supporting the ability to add ports and throughput the solution allows the school to manage all future growth in capacity and any increase in applications and service demands.
• Reporting capabilities: The solution is easy to manage and any alerts are reported by email. The previous solution would only notify CoatesPeter when there was a power cut, reboot or complete failure, allowing him to proactively manage his storage infrastructure helping reduce risk and improve SLAs.
• Pricing: The initial investment costs were favorable for a budget-conscious school but best of all there is no software or ongoing licensing fees – it’s all included – which makes budgeting easier for Coates and offers them a faster ROI.

“The QSAN solution has given us an enterprise solution but at a fraction of the cost of traditional storage vendors. The performance, features, and hardware of the QSAN SAN will allow the school significant growth and the ability to handle more workloads for the next few years and beyond,” said Coates.