The Customer

As a Beacon college designated "outstanding" by Ofsted, Richard Huish College can justifiably claim to be one of the best sixth form colleges in England. They seek to provide an environment in which young people can make an effective transition from school to university or employment. In this regard their outstanding enrichment and student support services combine with outstanding teaching and learning to provide our students with an experience that allows them to flourish.

The Challenge

Over the last five years the number of applications and their supporting servers had grown in line with the development of the college and its expanding portfolio of student services. With the growth of the server infrastructure came increased systems management complexity, increased physical footprint and increased operating costs. In addition, the college's desire to implement a high availability network and server infrastructure was becoming increasingly difficult due to its inherent complexity. Finally, like all organisations in the public sector, the college was being encouraged by central government to reduce energy consumption and the consequent carbon emissions. Richard Huish College needed a solution that would help meet these diverse challenges.

The Solution

Working closely with Deverill the College decided to conduct a detailed analysis of their current infrastructure by conducting a Deverill VMware Capacity Planning Survey over a full monthly IT cycle during May 2008. The survey identified that their entire server infrastructure was suitable for virtualisation and that by implementing the recommended solution, the number of physical servers could be reduced by 85% from 27 to 4 and a saving of £6000 per annum could be made on electricity savings alone. In addition the College's commitment to reduce emissions would benefit by reducing carbon emissions by 99 tonnes per annum. Having made the decision that this was the way forward for The College, the Head of IT initiated a competitive tender process for the project. Following evaluation of the responses Deverill were selected to supply all three components of the project, Virtualisation Consultancy, Virtualisation Software and the new HP Blade System infrastructure.

The project was scheduled for the second week of the College's summer holidays with one of the senior Deverill Virtualisation engineers. After building the VMware ESX servers and the supporting Storage Area Network (SAN) the process of virtualisation was undertaken with the emphasis on knowledge transfer to the College's own IT Team to ensure they had were left with the skills to ensure successful ongoing operation and management of the new virtualised environment.

Conclusion

The project was completed within the very tight timescales imposed by the highly pressured summer holiday and the College is now benefiting from:

• Lower operating costs
• Reduced floor space requirement
• Decreased cooling costs
• Reduced systems management time
• Higher systems availability
• Meeting targets to reduce carbon emissions

The Head of IT Services at Richard Huish College says: "The primary goals of the project have all been met and the College is already seeing the benefits and will reap further rewards as the year progresses." He continued: "We are delighted to be leading the way for Colleges in Somerset and believe that their (Deverill's) commitment to the highest levels of customer service and the close working partnership formed between Deverill and The College made a significant contribution to this project's success."