Unleashing the Potential of Educational Technology with Infrastructure that Just Works

Overview

Challenge

• Outdated hardware was unreliable and unpredictable, causing disruption for teachers, students and administrators.

Solution

• Migrating to a modern infrastructure built on Hitachi VSP G350 storage and Lenovo servers has transformed IT resilience and security.

Outcome

• Classes can always access the resources they need, while IT spends less time firefighting and more time focusing on strategic future facing projects.

Challenge

Manor Lodge School is an independent primary school for children aged 4 to 11 in Hertfordshire, UK. Located on a beautiful site in open countryside, the school is surrounded by fields, woodland and wildlife. Teaching and learning outdoors are embedded in its curriculum. Rain or shine, Manor Lodge students spend time every week learning how to build shelters, light campfires, cook food, engage with local flora and fauna, and practice traditional crafts such as blacksmithing and thatching, alongside a rigorous and modern academic curriculum. Learning isn’t confined to the classroom, and igniting every child’s curiosity is at the core of the Head’s  vision.

The school’s unique curriculum values technology and to support this ethos, students learn to use a variety of devices and operating systems, both in the classroom and across the school’s extensive grounds. Staff need to be able to access digital teaching materials and resources instantly from anywhere on-site and the IT team have continuously evolving plans to build on new solid foundations to incorporate ever more cutting-edge technologies.

Until recently, the school’s adoption of technology was hampered by reliability issues and outdated hardware. Its central IT infrastructure was built on aging servers and storage, which were increasingly difficult to maintain.

“Our old systems were becoming unreliable, which could potentially disrupt lessons if we couldn’t fix things quickly,” explains Matthew Clackett, IT and Digital Services Manager at Manor Lodge. “The balance between maintaining the core infrastructure and being able to plan for the future was becoming skewed towards day-to-day firefighting, and we were also stuck on outdated operating systems which meant we couldn’t adopt modern security tools. Data protection and cyber security are the two biggest concerns for any school’s IT team, so modernizing our infrastructure quickly became a priority.”

Solution

We started by taking a full inventory of the existing infrastructure to build a strong business case for investing in new systems. We understood this would be a significant investment for the school in building strong IT foundations for the next 5 to 10 years and beyond. We wanted the best, most reliable hardware we could find, and systems that would meet our needs.”

Manor Lodge ran a competitive tender process, shortlisted three vendors, and selected a solution from Hitachi Vantara that would be delivered by partners Qual and TD SYNNEX. “I used to work for Top Gear, and with cars, you really see how reliability depends on build quality,” says Clackett. “Of the vendors we considered, Hitachi was clearly the Rolls Royce in terms of the standard of engineering and support.”

With Qual acting as trusted advisor and TD SYNNEX providing deep technical expertise, Manor Lodge planned and executed a rapid, safe migration from its legacy infrastructure to the new solution. At the heart of the new environment is a Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) G350 array, which provides a 100% data availability guarantee and vast capacity for storing any type of data, from teaching materials to images and videos of students’ work.

Outcome

With the new infrastructure in place, Manor Lodge has eliminated the hardware faults that plagued its IT team and impacted everyone throughout the school. “We’ve only had one outage since we moved to Hitachi, and that wasn’t anything to do with the new hardware – it was a power cut that affected the entire local area,” Clackett says. “Even then, the new systems responded beautifully, and we were back online quickly. The storage even ‘phones home’ to Hitachi if it detects anything unusual, and we get notifications and check-ins from Hitachi engineers sometimes before we’ve even realized there’s a problem.”

With confidence in the reliability of the new systems, the IT team no longer needs to focus on firefighting and can focus on strategic projects. “With Hitachi, the infrastructure has become invisible because it just works,” says Matthew Clackett. “With IT we trust, we can be more confident and ambitious in our plans for the future. Staff and students are excited about using technology in the classroom and beyond.”

He concludes,: “With great support from Qual and TD SYNNEX, we’ve found a solution that completely resolves our reliability issues and provides a solid foundation for data protection and cyber security. With Hitachi’s high-quality storage at the core of our infrastructure, we can sleep well at night, knowing that our systems and data are safe.”