St Peter’s College head of ICT John Cosenza and his team reassessed how the needs of the school have evolved since 2016.
“Today we have more demand for media-rich content and database applications, rather than file storage,” explains Cosenza. “We were in need of a solution that would provide us with faster disk storage, a better data recovery and back-up solution, and the ability to scale as we continue to develop applications to enhance the learning experience for our students.”
Having developed partnerships with Data#3 and Dell Technologies over the past decade, Cosenza and his team were interested to hear about solutions that would meet their specific requirements.
As well as increased storage, St Peter’s College needed to modernise the data recovery solution it uses to back up over 100 virtual machines and support the development environment.
While it previously housed its data recovery on site, the team realised there were better fail-safe options available that would reduce time between failure and recovery.
“Infrastructure is important. Reliability of infrastructure builds trust and promotes digital confidence. Students, staff, and parents are accessing the platform at all times throughout the day and night, and from across Australia and the world. We needed a solution that synchronised data in real time and minimised the risk of downtime for our users,” explains Cosenza on the driver behind the upgrade.
The proposal to modernise and future-proof St Peter’s College’s IT infrastructure involved moving to Dell EMC VxRail, a hyperconverged platform that simplifies the IT process by providing a single point of support for all software and hardware, and Dell EMC PowerEdge servers to allow the school to scale its environment as its digital needs grow.
Since the migration, St Peter’s College observed the following benefits. Back-up times have been reduced from hours to minutes. Upgrades to the infrastructure are now automatic, reducing downtime and saving administrative time, thus freeing up the IT team to focus on strategic projects.
In addition, the new infrastructure mitigates delays or connectivity issues for vital applications built by St Peter’s College’s development team—such as managing sporting fixtures, continuous academic reporting, timetabling, online diaries, access to photography, online forms, and other resources.
Aligned with the school’s overall ICT strategy, which includes a goal of increased environmental sustainability, St Peter’s College has reduced its technology footprint and power consumption with this upgrade.
The new solution also plays an essential part in driving St Peter’s College eLearning mission statement, which is to equip students with the future-ready skills they need to succeed in their careers and use technology to provide a space to innovate in and enrich learning experiences.
