“Havant Academy opened in September 2010 with a new vision for 21st Century Learning underpinned by outstanding IT. With this in mind the Academy appointed Medhurst to implement a complete IT refurbishment. With their technical expertise and dedication Medhurst has helped Havant Academy to meet their vision for IT by providing an infrastructure that is innovative, sustainable, expandable and cost saving.” Richard Markey, IT Director, Havant Academy
Customer Profile
Havant Academy, Hampshire, relies on Information Communications Technology to meet the expectations of its students by improving the quality of teaching and ensuring reliable disaster recovery and data protection. Havant Academy requested the assistance of Medhurst to design and implement a complete refresh of all the IT services that existed within the school.
Business Needs
The Academy inherited an insufficient IT infrastructure that included 15 physical servers that were in desperate need of upgrading due to a severe lack of resources such as processor, storage and memory. As a result of this lack of performance, resources and expandability, the users of the Academy network would regularly experience logon times of up to seven minutes, having a dramatic impact on learning and teaching. The system also had limited resources and a lack of expansion capability. Due to the limitations of the existing server infrastructure in terms of resilience, efficiency and expansion, the Academy decided to refresh the entire system.
Key requirements were to provide a robust and resilient network infrastructure to support the future plans of the Academy. The entire legacy network infrastructure was removed or re-commissioned in accordance with these plans.
Solution
Richard Markey decided, with advice from Medhurst, to roll out Hyper-V R2 with core components of the Microsoft System Center suite. Markey integrated a selection of system centre products providing additional enhancements. Virtual Machine Manager 2007 R2 (SCVMM) allows for the simple management and provision of virtual machines helping to improve the response time for IT support to implement new IT services. Operations Manager 2007 R2 (SCOM) enables the IT Support Team to monitor the physical Hyper-V Hosts and the virtual machines that they are running. PRO Tips has also been enabled to create alerts if resources need adjusting and will live Migrate virtual machines between hosts if required.
“Hyper-V combined with System Center provides the Academy with an IT Infrastructure that has changed the culture of how our IT Support Team operates. Providing less operational headaches and allowing us to be more strategic,” explained Markey.
Results
Keeping up-to-date with modifications and upgrades to networks is time consuming and costly. Medhurst provided Havant Academy with a team of highly-qualified IT specialists to enable them to overcome their IT challenges, plan for the future and make the most of their IT budgets.
Hyper-V R2 has dramatically reduced the amount of physical servers used to provide core IT services for the Academy. This has led to significant cost savings on future hardware purchases, power usage and heating. Clustering services allow virtual servers to be made highly available and can be migrated between physical hosts with the click of a button. Hyper-V offered an expandable solution that can evolve with the Academy, whilst simultaneously providing industry standard resilience and performance.
Richard Markey concludes,
“From going to a school where technology was old, slow, and sometimes didn’t work at all, to an Academy with a fresh new IT infrastructure, takes time to plan, especially when 500 new desktops are involved. However all of the above was rolled out in just 6 weeks with the help of Medhurst.”