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Kirklees College in Yorkshire uses DataCore's SANsymphony-V platform to provide its 20,000 students with a modern blended learning delivery environment in line with the 2014 FELTAG (Further Education Learning Technology Action Group) report recommendations. The report caused concern throughout the UK's 400 Further Education institutions, as it defined the need for IT to quickly remove any IT infrastructure obstacles that may impede the progress of provisioning combined self-directed studies with traditional college based course delivery or risk losing IT funding.

Jonathan Wilkinson (Head of IT, Kirklees) and Simon Powell (Senior Storage Engineer, Kirklees) have elected to use Software-defined Storage as their flexible, always-on backbone. Jonathan notes: "Essentially we were looking to build upon what had already been achieved using DataCore as a platform across 8 years.

The pace of change facing education is nothing short of a revolution in the way we facilitate our students. What needs to underpin this change is a watertight, expandable system that allows us to grow capacity as needed and keep applications highly performant on a continuous basis. SANsymphony-V delivers the high-end storage services we need today and provides the flexibility for further growth in the future."

REMOVING IT OBSTACLES IN A RAPIDLY TRANSITIONING INFRASTRUCTURE
Part of Kirklees College's success in being at the forefront of this dual delivery lies with the flexible, always-on and ready to expand, software based IT infrastructure delivered through a fully functioning Storage Area Network (SAN). The decision to move toward Software-driven Storage actually occurred well ahead of the mainstream rush initially to combat incidents of outages of their virtual servers through the deployment of the DataCore software.

Then, as the College expanded and merged, the DataCore storage virtualisation platform continued to comfortably provide a scalable and robust platform for expansion and resilience. And that ability to scale and trim is key to adherence and optimal IT enablement. In 2013, as part of a move to the new campus' data centre, DataCore Gold Partner, NCE recommended an overhaul of the original SAN infrastructure with new storage hardware from Nexsan's by Imation storage family, together with an upgrade to DataCore's SANsymphony-V10 enhanced software-defined software platform for full future proofing and latest feature sets.

Now, fully armed with the ability to perform additional operations such as Random Write Acceleration to speed transactional processing and DR snapshots that ensure replication of data on a real time basis, the team can relax in the knowledge that they are flexibly enabled for many years to come. Simon comments: "There are some neat features in the upgraded DataCore solution that we have noted. We now use Random Write acceleration to reduce the storage overhead as it produces faster storage-friendly sequential writes at our busy data mining times. Auto Tiering now also automates and allocates the data seamlessly."

Flexibility of the solution is a key attribute for the College. DataCore opens up choices through its full agnostic approach to hardware provision, taking stranded storage capacity into free space, and has allowed the team a more bullish approach to selecting the most appropriate vendor without fear of future lock in when the hardware warranty expires. Flexibility is also paramount in considering the way that the college caters for students' learning preferences under FELTAG recommendations. "It is true that lots of solutions claim to offer resilience and flexibility, but there are few solutions on the market that could offer us the total peace of mind that DataCore offers, and has done so for many years," concluded Jonathan Wilkinson. "Once installed, SANsymphony-V is a transparent software layer that you can fine tune as you go along without fear of failure, downtime or a dramatic overhaul to the infrastructure or College budget. We wouldn't face the future without it."
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