UK St Richard’s Catholic College Chooses Scale Computing

Scale Computing, Inc., a provider of hyperconverged solutions, announced that UK-based St Richard’s Catholic College has selected its HC3 system to bring its infrastructure and student learning experience into the 21st century.

St Richard’s has a 50-year tradition of high quality education as a foundation to build upon, with a goal to transition from print-based teaching to an environment of digital learning excellence. The college has a staff of 200 and student base of 1,000. St Richard’s needed to replace its aging EMC legacy data center environment with new technology to achieve higher throughput performance, higher availability, and deliver an expanding list of services. The legacy environment lacked reliability and did not meet the faculty or student objectives for a reasonable log-on speed, and it was a very complex task to configure and very costly on IT resources to support.

The St Richard’s IT Team evaluated SAN solutions from Hewlett-Packard Development Company and Dell, Inc., along with hyperconverged solutions from Nutanix, Inc. and Scale Computing.

“We decided to go with Scale Computing as it was not only more cost effective in reducing our TCO versus others we evaluated, but it also had incredible simplicity as an overall solution that would easily move us from our EMC environment,” said Mark Lane, systems manager. “The cost savings with Scale Computing were extremely compelling and the total cost of the system was 40% lower than continuing our EMC renewal contract. The foundation we now have with Scale’s HC3 will enable even greater CapEx and OpEx savings over the next 5 years.“

“The installation of the HC3 system took one hour to unpack, attach rack rails, and connect power to the system. In the next hour, we had the system clustered and connected to our fibre network,” said Lane. “The entire setup of user permissions, access control, security, and virtualizing the storage environment was complete in three days. The installation went flawlessly and was totally transparent to the users.“

One of the most business critical applications is logging onto the system and authentication for faculty and students in the classroom. “On our previous EMC storage, log on times for our Microsoft CIFS system would take 2 minutes and now with HC3 we are now experiencing sub 25 second log-on time for a 300% productivity gain“.

With the cost effectiveness of the HC3 system, St Richard’s is implementing an additional HC3 system for DR and greater protection of the College’s information assets. The HC3 systems are identical at both sites to meet desired performance SLAs and to deliver transparent access to all College systems.

“We have had our initial HC3 system installed for 18 months and our DR system running for 6 months and we have not experienced any downtime,” said Lane. “We have upgraded our system to a dual configuration which not only gives us greater scale, but also enhances our system resiliency.“

“Our HC3 System reduced our physical footprint 300% and cut our power and cooling in half for an incredible cost savings while making a big difference with carbon footprint,” said Lane. “More than anything else, our IT environment is no longer a stressful environment as we no longer have to deal with the hot issue of the moment.“

“With the previous EMC storage system St Richard’s tried to implement 200 Citrix thin clients, but could not get it to work,” said Lane. “We had no servers virtualized before HC3, but now everything is virtualized which not only enables us to optimize our client/server resources, but the lower administrative support to manage our entire data center complex is saving us precious time and increasing productivity.“

“We think that all schools and colleges should go to a hyperconverged model like our environment as it is cost effective, sustainable, and instills confidence to users,” said Lane. “If I was an IT solution provider or reseller, I would take a good look at HC3 as a plug and play solution for any customer because it just works.“