Medhurst Helps School Save £23,000 With Innovative Virtualised Environment

Low running costs, fewer server purchases, faster backup and recovery and simplified maintenance and administration will save Neville Lovett Community School a minimum of £23,000 over three years. At Medhurst, we believe that it is vital to provide schools with high-quality equipment that will do the job required whilst keeping students’ IT skills in this area up-to-date. Just as businesses work to tight budgets, so do schools. By running a system with reduced space and reduced downtime, schools can make huge cost savings in both power and management, whilst providing more resilient in day-to-day operations.

In 2009, the school network was migrated to Windows Server 2008 R2, to take advantage of Hyper-V virtualisation technology. After two weeks of using Hyper-V technology, IT Manager Richard Markey not only saw that the system was more cost-effective for the school than VMware but it also provided tools for managing the Neville Lovett network more efficiently.

With Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007, Neville Lovett can manage all servers from a single monitor, which means we can prevent many of the problems that cause user downtime. For example, the system can back up and restore a student’s work in around 15 minutes. In addition, Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 provides employees with the tools to deploy updates remotely, and configure machines to comply with the school’s policies, improving network security and increasing performance and availability.