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Barnsley College in South Yorkshire provides a wide range of vocational, A Level, higher education and part-time courses and an extremely successful apprenticeship programme. The college runs five main sites plus a number of remote sites and has 800 teachers supporting some 9,550 students.

Like many educational institutions, Barnsley College needed to update its IT infrastructure to improve performance, meet changing user needs and support future development. The college had a fully virtualised VMware infrastructure and IBM BladeCenter server architecture running applications including student management, finance, payroll and HR, plus SQL, CAD and Adobe Creative Suite. It was experiencing particular problems with its existing IBM storage infrastructure, including an inability to run 8Gbps fibre channel reliably. The result was that connections were frequently lost and data transfer times, especially for backup and disaster recovery, were becoming slower and slower.

ACCESS ALL AREAS
These performance issues were also affecting the thousands of students who required constant access to their virtualised desktops, personal profiles and documents. Log-on times were becoming unacceptably long, up to three and a half minutes. The existing storage infrastructure was unable to cope with heavy network traffic from multiple access points. As a result the college was struggling to provide an efficient service to staff and students alike.

The College needed a new storage infrastructure which could handle its multisite network and increase the performance of the virtual desktop environment by optimising access to user profiles and stored files. Its IT team also wanted effective deduplication and compression to speed up the read/write process and maximise storage potential for the future, as well as to reduce licencing fees for document management software.

"We were no longer confident our existing storage solution could support the storage needs of the college," explained Mark Kendrick, Head of IT Services at Barnsley College. "The majority of our stored information is either user profiles or documents and office files. As our students and staff need 24 hour access to their personal files and information as well as space to store additional documents, we wanted both high capacity storage capabilities and streamlined operations for all users. So we researched the market for the best value solution which would provide the performance we needed at an affordable price."

Mark goes on: "As well as increasing our storage capacity, we needed high performance hardware which could cope with the increasing demands of the student body and staff on campus. We also wanted to increase the robustness of our recovery system, as our backup window was around three days."

Mark and his colleague spoke to a number of organisations, including flash storage experts Tegile, whose arrays offer instantaneous file backups and a 24 hour window for full network restore functionality. Tegile introduced Mark to IT infrastructure specialists Fordway.

COMPARING THE PROS AND CONS
"We found Fordway's approach very interesting and refreshing," said Mark. "It wasn't about selling us what we didn't want but finding the right technology for what we needed to do. Their main concern wasn't making a sale but ensuring that we made the right decision and got the right technology in. They're technology agnostic, so were able to compare the pros and cons of different solutions against our requirements.

"We were looking at another product, but Fordway thought that the Tegile solution would work better for us, so they arranged for us to have a live demo. After comparing the options available we decided on Tegile intelligent flash arrays."

Barnsley College chose a Tegile HA2100 hybrid flash array with 22TB of capacity, of which 600GB is flash. The array includes all of the software as part of the solution, eliminating the need for software licences. The unit arrived within a week of order confirmation and was installed within 24 hours of delivery.

"Tegile carried out the installation and there was a very smooth transition from our old system to the new, without any noticeable disruption to the service," explained Mark. "Fordway held our hand all the way from the procurement to the installation - we were able to rely on them at every stage."

The multiprotocol (iSCSI, fibre channel and NAS) dual controller array uses a combination of DRAM cache, MLC and SAS HDD storage tiers. Tegile has adapted the ZFS-based operating system to provide data deduplication, compression, RAID enhancements and a feature called Metadata Accelerated Storage System (MASS). Once data is in the system, MASS allows it to be dealt with via its metadata headers rather than the full copy with headers kept in cache or SDD tiers. This compression and de-duplication capacity was particularly important for the college as it promised to decrease significantly the size of the files currently stored in the campus servers.

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