Askham Bryan College was founded in 1948 and offers further and higher education land based studies and community education from its base close to York and other centres in Bedale, Harrogate, Thirsk, Guisborough, Scarborough and Bradford.  Askham Bryan is the biggest true land based college in the country providing education and training at all levels, full and part-time, from introductory courses for school leavers right up to honours degrees. There are up to 1000 staff and students on its main site at any one time, using 200 student PCs and 170 staff PCs. 

Before The Horse Has Bolted

With a vast number of users accessing its network for both work and social purposes and saving numerous documents onto the system, Askham Bryan decided it was good practice to evaluate its hardware and software infrastructure.  Following this in-house assessment the IT team realised it needed to address the IT disaster recovery (DR) set-up within the College.  The checks revealed that there was a critical hole which needed to be addressed immediately.  John Mawson, Director of Physical Resources says the college quickly realised there was an issue:

“It became apparent that if we had a situation where a system went down, we couldn’t guarantee that we could save a user’s document in the short-term.  The potential was there for us to lose valuable time, days even, trying to retrieve work as we didn’t have the ability to recover quickly if we lost a major system.  The obvious answer was to go to a vendor and just buy a new server.  However, we soon realised that would take too long to organise; several days to purchase, deliver and then more time to install and test, so we were looking at a month to recover items that had simply been lost.  The time, cost and inconvenience this would have caused was just unacceptable for any business.  For the college, it would have potentially meant that students’ might lose valuable coursework which was needed for a deadline or a teacher might not have access to teaching aids that they were working on.”

There was a separate issue that Askham Bryan had in addition to the unsatisfactory IT DR set-up, which was a proliferation of servers it was finding difficult to track and manage as John Mawson continues:

“It became evident that we had a number of servers of different ages and types.  We had added extra servers and over the years we had bought systems that needed separate servers and to be frank it was quite unmanageable.  Adding servers on such an ad-hoc basis meant when we added them all up, we learned that we actually had 28 of them; some were just a couple of years old, others were aging and out of warranty meaning it was difficult and costly for us to get parts to support them and allow them to function efficiently.”

A Lesson In 2010 IT

With two main issues, that of a proliferation of servers and no DR set-up, Askham Bryan decided it needed to urgently review its software and hardware.  The IT department specified that it wanted a system which was more resilient and scalable compared to the infrastructure which the college had inherited.  Having researched the market and found several possible opportunities to explore, Askham Bryan needed to employ a company who were on the Office of Government Commerce Framework (OGC) and Trustmarque Solutions fitted the bill.  Trustmarque’s Infrastructure Solutions Manager Kevin Green visited the college with his expert team to assess the extent of the problem says John Mawson:

“We had presentations from several companies but Trustmarque’s knowledge and expertise shone through from the moment we contacted them.  Kevin talked us through our requirements and scoped out what we needed and planned how it would all be rolled out.  He did this through an interactive demonstration and during a number of site visits where his team surveyed our existing network.   We were really impressed with the amount of time Kevin and his team invested in us before we’d even agreed to Trustmarque doing any work.”

Trustmarque undertook a Virtualisation Readiness Assessment (VRA) on Askham Bryan’s system over the period of a month to look at how the college’s servers were performing.  This is an effective way of evaluating and proving what impact a virtual infrastructure will have on the data centre.  Trustmarque uses VRAs as a tool in demonstrating how a virtualised environment would improve server management as well as maximising uptime.  From this up-to-the minute data and the subsequent output report, Trustmarque looked at aspects like memory utilisation, for example how it was being used and when it was being used and then cross-checking this with what the college actually needed. 

The next step for Trustmarque was to factor in the forecast growth over the next five years and to then add this into the necessary plan of action as well as to prepare a timeframe for the work which was both suitable and convenient, whilst still ensuring critical deadlines could be met. 

All In The Detail

Previously, Trustmarque had undertaken some security work at the college and that relationship meant an element of trust and understanding was already there.  That said, Trustmarque still had to prove itself in this space as it was a different team who was doing the job and a different area of expertise.  But, having been impressed by the work which Trustmarque had undertaken with the VRA and the monitoring and assessing of the problem, Askham College had no hesitation in awarding the contract to address their data storage issues to Trustmarque Solutions.

John Mawson adds: “As a college, there was no question for us that we had to choose a supplier who was listed on the OGC framework.  The fact that Trustmarque was on the framework allowed us to seek their opinion on our situation and in turn made us realise that Trustmarque was the right company for the job. We learnt a lot from the team about our systems just in the pre-sales work and undoubtedly that proved to us that they had the skills to do the work properly.  We were also impressed by Trustmarque’s partnerships with HP and VMware and we had heard from other institutions and from our own homework and experience, that the organisation was a reliable and recommended value added reseller.  The fact that Trustmarque was local to us was just a bonus and Kevin and his team were always available to talk to us.”

With the VRA report conducted in December 2009, the team had already ascertained what work Askham Bryan really wanted to address.  The focus was on virtualisation and implementing a support contract.  Armed with the review of policies and procedures with a clear appreciation of what the college required, the virtualisation of its servers was completed in early 2010.  This was right on target and met Askham Bryan’s deadline as it had been planned to coincide with its financial year.  The deployment went to plan and as John Mawson adds, Trustmarque went over and above what was originally agreed: “Once we had everything set-up, we realised that there were a few issues around other areas of our storage which needed to be sorted out.  We had a fault on our storage system that Trustmarque couldn’t have known about, a network problem, and despite it not being in Trustmarque’s remit, the team were happy to advise and help us to provide an alternative back-up solution.  In fact, Trustmarque has added a lot of value to the system which we wouldn’t have had otherwise.  We basically got it as a good-will extra.  Kevin and his team also worked to our agenda so we could fit work in around timetabled breaks rather than disrupt the day-to-day business.  The price quoted was the price charged and the project came in on time.  You can’t ask for anything more than that.”

Bringing The College Up To Speed

Virtualisation is a modern way of working and it is in keeping with the whole ethos of an educational establishment to be at the forefront of ideas and innovation. Its adoption is common place and now that they are also seeing the benefits of virtualisation, John Mawson says the college has taken a giant step forward.

“It took us realising we had an inconvenient and challenging problem to take this step but we will never look back.  We are definitely now greener and leaner.  As a college which promotes the environment we should be seen to be working efficiently and in the most environmentally friendly way as possible.  Carbon issues are something that many of our students study and for us to not be doing our bit was just hypocritical.  Having all of those servers was costing us money through energy and support costs as well as the carbon footprint this all leaves.  Virtualisation pitches us as thought leaders compared to other colleges and we are proud to be leading the way for this fantastic improvement.  Having spoken to other educational establishments about what virtualisation has done for us, I believe that soon many others will also go down this route.”

Askham College was sold on the benefits of virtualisation having been talked through the pros and cons by Kevin Green and his colleagues at Trustmarque, but it wasn’t until the solution to its server proliferation and DR set-up had been addressed that the college truly recognised the benefits:

John Mawson adds: “We are definitely already seeing operational paybacks on our investment.  The routine task of moving a server used to involve a lot of inconvenience to the user and hassle to the IT staff as we had to demand down-time on the system.  However, now we can make changes easily by keeping the system live using the virtualisation software by migrating the live systems to boxes which are left turned on.  The end user doesn’t see down-time.  Previously this would not have been possible.  It is a fantastic result not just for the staff and students but for us as an IT team.”

Building Solid Foundations

Despite the new structure being in its infancy, Askham Bryan is already exploring ways to move forward with the system because it is so adaptable and user-friendly.  It is now looking at document management for the finance department and how desktop virtualisation would work in the college environment.

John Mawson comments:“We demanded a solution which was scalable and that’s what we got.  Having seen how we can manipulate it now to our advantage, we are excited by what we could achieve with virtualisation elsewhere.  I know that we got the best price for the best solution tailored to meet our needs.  Having worked with Trustmarque a couple of times, it’s obvious why the company has such a strong reputation as a trusted advisor.  I would work with Trustmarque again in the future for other major projects and having Trustmarque as our third line support means we already have a good relationship which I am sure will continue to grow.”

www.trustmarque.com

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