AYRSHIRE COLLEGE INFRASTRUCTURE AS-A-SERVICE
With three campuses spread across Ayr, Kilmarnock, and Kilwinning in South West Scotland, the award-winning Ayrshire College offers a wide range of vocational and academic courses – including employer training and business support. With more than 10,000 registered students and over 800 staff, the college is a critical social and economic powerhouse for the region.
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Industry
EducationObjective
Migrate existing on-premise workloads to Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) powered by HPE GreenLake for improved capacity and cost efficiency and performance.IT matters
Installing HPE GreenLake hybrid cloud platform, replacing HPE 3PAR storage arrays, gaining more capacity and greater flexibility to scale up and down to meet demand in real-time and save money and reducing carbon footprint by deploying what is needed today rather than pre-provisioning and paying now for future requirements. -
Approach
A managed service offered by DTP to simplify capacity and workload management, improve application performance, and provide a platform for future growth.Business matters
Flex infrastructure capacity as required to ensure business continuity, centralised workload management, automate elements of compliance using HPE GreenLake Central and an AI-driven capacity and performance monitoring and management.
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THE CHALLANGE
Modern education institutions now rely more on technology than ever before.
From business-critical applications and compute to large-scale file storage, access to reliable, secure, and cost-effective IT is no longer nice to have; it’s non-negotiable.
And Ayrshire College is no different. With a significant on-premise server estate handling many of its back-office functions and storage, the college’s technology is arguably one of its most important assets.
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When the college commenced a £53m redevelopment project, they felt like they didn’t just need a “good enough” redesign of their IT systems.
Ayrshire College needed a flexible solution that would enable it to operate its on-premise infrastructure, augmented with additional data-processing and storage capacity as and when it needed it.
The college also needed the solution to be autonomous enough to anticipate the need for additional storage before it could impact business continuity, and ideally start them on their hybrid cloud journey.
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THE APPROACH
As a response to Covid-19, a shift to blended learning and hybrid working meant increased use of their Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) platform.
This combined with the need to process and store increasingly large and complex files and applications – Ayrshire College’s IT team was acutely aware it was running out of storage space.
Likewise, with a limited CapEx budget and no spare resources to invest in public cloud migration, the college needed a quick and cost-effective solution that would give it the breathing room to investigate and execute a long-term hybrid cloud strategy.
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Taking this all into account, the approach was a managed service offered by DTP to simplify capacity and workload management, improve application performance, and provide a platform for future growth.
Based on the college’s needs, DTP suggested an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution, powered by HPE GreenLake, enabling Ayrshire College to operate its existing on-premise server and storage estate, but with the power, flexibility, and scalability of the cloud, and wrap around tools that deliver it all within a cloud-like experience.
With the combination of HPE Moonshot, 3PAR and Citrix, the College was able to enable more users than with competing systems – ensuring students would be able to use even the most demanding software packages through virtual clients
THE FINAL RESULT
With HPE GreenLake’s advanced compression and de-duplication technology, Ayrshire College now benefits from top-level performance with around 60% of its storage capacity available at any one time – allowing the college to grow its resource to meet future needs.
In fact, Brad and his team are doing the groundwork to migrate key applications and storage to the hybrid cloud – and retire its older on premise disk storage.
“While we like the idea of on-premise infrastructure, we know that to give our students and staff access to the latest technology, hybrid cloud is the way forward. We’ve been absolutely delighted with what DTP have given us, not least because we now have the breathing room to plan for the future hybrid cloud strategically. We’ve got full confidence in our longterm partnership.”
To learn more about DTP’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service solutions or our wider partnership with HPE, get in touch with one of our experts today.
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