Case study: Storage and Data Solutions for Universities

Article Oct 21, 2022

When North Oxford Shared College Services (NOSCS) needed to update their storage and processing power, as well as strengthen their cybersecurity armour, they looked to Trustmarque to push ahead with this critical innovation.

After five years of using their existing VMware storage solution, they were keen to keep up the pace with their next investment. This time they were confident in taking a more hands-on approach to installation and upskilling, as Ben Bridle, Group Head of ICT at NOSCS, explains:

“We needed a system which could be sized in terms of processing power, to cope with the next 5+ years of requirements in operating systems and business applications.”

Ben Bridle, Group Head of ICT, NOSCS

Old vs. new storage and data solutions

Ben and the team have reaped the benefits of the upgrade:

Old environment
Two x IntelliFlash arrays
Four x Dell servers and Brocade networking.
Ageing EOSL systems, didn’t have enough performance and needed to incorporate the fourth college whereas the previous solution only catered for three.
No Security posture just snapshots on storage arrays which would not have protected in the event of a cyber-attack.

New environment
Two x T4200 IntelliFlash Hybrid Flash Arrays
Four x Dell Poweredge R640 Servers
Four x Dell DNS5224F Switches
Cyber Resilient and Back Up Platform:
– Arcserve – Onexafe

Because the previous system was so successful, despite many alternatives being offered via other providers, it was decided that a newer version of what they had before (with added capabilities around backup, cyber, for instance) would future-proof the setup.

Benefits of the new storage and data solutions

Performance increases

This method allows for good performance without taking a hit to bandwidth usage as data is not replicated to remote backups in real-time, as in a synchronous replication method.

Improved cyber security and resilience with immutable copies

A-sync replication that couldn’t be done on the older generation of storage (in async the data is written to the primary storage first, then depending on the settings and the type of implementation, replicates the data into a separate remote storage medium, in this case, the second array). The copying or replication is done in predetermined intervals.

The Solution

Following an initial evaluation using the guidance in place at higher education institutions during IT solution and service procurement and a thorough overview of the market, Ben received several responses to the proposal. After careful consideration of the responses from several possible candidates, a proposal came from Account Manager, Chris Barnes at Trustmarque. Working with Chris, Ben and his team decided upon storage and data solutions from Tintri which offered a broad and highly-regarded range of Intelligent Infrastructure solutions to meet any enterprise storage requirement. Tintri delivers an exceptional user experience through automation, analytic insights, and a variety of time-saving features to simplify the management of the most valuable workloads.

During the installation of the solution, the then ongoing COVID-19 restrictions slowed down the process significantly – preventing Ben and his team from shadowing the technicians as closely as they had hoped. However, they are buoyed by what the solution will bring to their business continuity response.

“Previously, we had a technician who spent two days building the datacentre in situ and at that time we were quite hands-off. This time, we knew we needed to take more of the lead to future-proof the solution, so we got involved from the word go.”

Ben Bridle, Group Head of ICT, NOSCS

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