Ysgol Aberconwy School, a mixed comprehensive school located on the North Wales coast, faced a challenge when their server and storage estate approached end-of-life. They needed an infrastructure that could deliver an agile and responsive service and was easier to manage with a small IT team.
That's when they turned to their managed services provider, Advatek, to discuss their options. The technical team at Advatek proposed a Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) solution from Nutanix, which combines compute, storage, networking, and virtualization to vastly improve performance, lower IT spend, and save system management time.
One of the key factors in Ysgol Aberconwy's decision to choose Nutanix was the extensive expertise of Advatek’s technical services team in HCI and Nutanix technology. The Nutanix Prism Central Dashboard gave them total visibility of how the network was performing, simplifying monitoring and remediation with an end-to-end application centric view of the network.
“We evaluated the solution based on price and quality. Advatek’s Senior Technical Consultant had many years’ experience with Nutanix and recommended this solution. This was a key part of the equation. We would not have been comfortable going ahead without the experience of Advatek," Kuljit Bratch.
The Nutanix Dashboard also allowed Ysgol Aberconwy to easily move resources from one virtual machine to another and create another virtual server to match supply with demand. This was crucial as they often experienced spiking demand on the virtual server for the pupil database during the school day, with their 100 teaching and support staff using it simultaneously.
The HCI solution was delivered by Advatek ready for the new school year in September, and Ysgol Aberconwy was thrilled with the results. They had full visibility of their infrastructure's performance on a dashboard, which showed CPU, storage, and RAM usage. This enabled them to easily move resources from elsewhere to that virtual machine as well as other VMs in their setup.
“The biggest factor for us was having full visibility of our infrastructure and it’s performance on a dashboard in addition to how quickly we can move resources from one virtual machine to another and create another virtual server to match supply with demand. We often see spiking demand on the virtual server for the pupil database during the school day, with our 100 teaching and support staff using it simultaneously. The Nutanix Dashboard shows us CPU, storage and RAM usage and we can easily move resources from elsewhere to that virtual machine as well as other VMs in our setup”
With the Nutanix Prism Central Dashboard, Ysgol Aberconwy have total visibility of how the network is performing. Prism Central is a single console to manage the entire environment, simplifying monitoring and remediation with an end-to-end application centric view of the network.
“With a traditional set up of SANs and physical servers, it’s a challenge to keep everything working especially when you’re dealing with different manufacturers and software vendors. It can be like looking for a needle in a haystack if there are problems with the SAN or NAS and as the VMs are mirrored, there is no loss of service if there is a problem with one of the servers. Having everything on one dashboard was a significant selling point for us,”
By implementing Nutanix HCI, Ysgol Aberconwy School was able to simplify management, improve performance, and lower IT spend. They also had the peace of mind that their infrastructure was in the hands of experienced professionals. If you're looking for a solution to simplify IT management and improve performance in the education sector, consider Nutanix HCI.
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