Kings College’s more than 50 virtual servers are vital to the institute’s large workforce and yet were only allocated 17TB of storage, a fraction of what IT manager Mark Andrews calculated the organisation would need in the next five years. As a result, Andrews called on NexStor to help select a solution that could accommodate the college’s increasing data volumes and offer improved performance, critically, within the team’s allocated budget.
Andrews said: “We talked to several potential partners and NexStor really stood out. The team was the quickest to understand what we needed, was very easy to work with, and came highly recommended by a neighbouring college. NexStor’s experience and knowledge meant it asked us the right questions, put forward the most suitable solution that fitted our budget, and then quickly implement it. We were up and running in a week and are very impressed with the results so far.”
As well as scalability, the college also needed its new solution to support its existing VMware software and predicted updates over the next five years. NexStor recommended a Nimble CS300 SAN and its team was able to carry out migration and implementation within a week. Its service also includes aftercare, so Kings College can now easily get support if it runs into any teething problems. The college has seen a notable improvement in the performance of its virtual estate and applications. Trouble-shoot capabilities are better too, and the Veeam backup system installed by NexStor has enabled the restoration of data more granularly, alongside enhanced backup reporting.
NexStor director Troy Platts said: “Kings College came to us with a familiar problem – its existing storage solution had been designed more than five years ago. It was not prepared for the enormous growth in data volumes that we’ve all experienced since then, and was certainly not going to cope with the predicted increase in demand for storage space in the coming five years. We made it our priority to find the college a solution that would grow with it and that would offer a little more too. By recommending the Nimble SAN, we were able to address performance issues and provide the peace of mind that comes with more reliable recovery procedures.”
