Education institutions learn infrastructure lesson

Education institutions experience a unique set of requirements for right-sized, simple-to-operate, enterprise-class IT solutions that can be deployed quickly and managed easily by lean IT teams. Rolling Hills Local School District, Sweyne Park School and Marion School District all faced these requirements, including a need for an IT infrastructure with high performance and minimal management to power their education institutions.

Rolling Hills Local School District, an Ohio-based school district, wanted to focus resources on enrolment growth and new learning initiatives, rather than spending hours recovering from hardware failure and downtime on its mission-critical workloads. Using Scale Computing HC3 platform, Rolling Hills School District improved on its disaster recovery plan and scalability, while reducing the number of vendors for infrastructure support. Overall, the one-person IT team reduced the amount of time spent on infrastructure management by over 50 percent.

“HC3, purely as a hardware refresh, provided a vast improvement in the speed of services and provisioning of new VMs,” said James Buckey, CTO, Rolling Hills Local School District. “We did not have high availability or redundancy before Scale Computing. Now I can survive most failures or disasters.”

Sweyne Park School is an innovative academy school based in Rayleigh, Essex, United Kingdom and is attended by 1,600 students between 11-18 years old. The Rayleigh Schools Trust, which includes Sweyne Park School, found their existing IT environment and the school’s entire storage system was coming to the end of its service life and had expensive licensing fees. Facing reduced IT budgets, the school deployed Scale Computing’s HC3 4000 cluster.

“Scale Computing’s solution is perfect for us and any educational body. School budgets are being tightened left, right and centre, so finding a solution that could offer us the performance, scalability and flexibility for our needs at a price point that worked for us was great. The solution gives us peace of mind as it runs with minimal management. This time- and cost-saving enables us to increase resources elsewhere in the school,” said Dan Joslin, systems manager, Rayleigh Schools Trust.

Marion School District, located in Marion County, Arkansas, is home to more than 4,300 public school students. The school district turned to Scale Computing to help its IT staff of three reduce time spent managing infrastructure by replacing existing hardware with Scale Computing HC3. The deployment helped the IT team reduce time spent managing its infrastructure by 25-49 percent.

“Scale Computing HC3 brings peace of mind because of its high availability,” said Sam Uddin, IT administrator, Marion School District.

With Scale Computing HC3, edge computing, virtualisation, servers, storage and backup/disaster recovery have been brought into a single, easy-to-use platform. All of the components are built in, including the hypervisor, without the need for any third-party components or licensing. Scale Computing HC3 is far less complex than other solutions, greatly simplifying the management and maintenance of IT infrastructure. Scale Computing HC3 includes rapid deployment, automated management capabilities and a single pane of management, helping to streamline and simplify daily tasks, as well as saving time and money.

“Education institutions need IT infrastructure with maximum simplicity, uptime and efficiency to power the district that students, teachers and staff depend on,” said Jeff Ready, co-founder and CEO, Scale Computing. “Instead of siloing IT processes, HC3 combines storage, servers, management and virtualisation into a comprehensive system and automates overall management. This allows IT teams and administrators to spend time focusing on projects that significantly impact student learning, with the peace of mind that their IT infrastructure is running reliably.”