With HPE suggesting its technology will be available well into the 24th century through last year’s Star Trek ads, it seems Scotch Oakburn College in Tasmania has seen proof of the future.
An independent co-ed school in Launceston, Tasmania, Scotch Oakburn College, has gained some enterprising new technology from HPE: hyperconverged and HPE Pointnext solutions designed to “boost its performance and improve the user experience, while minimising connectivity disruptions and operational costs".
Because of the “increasingly competitive education sector”, Scotch Oakburn College explained that it “needed to offer its 1200 students and 250 staff reliable, secure and modern technology to allow flexibility and ensure continuity across its three campuses".
And, because the college had been experiencing periods of system unavailability whenever they had an outage, taking the school back to the 19th century, which disrupted teaching and examinations, while creating financial implications, it was clear that the old school trek into darkness would need to be transformed into the voyage home to scalability, reliability and beyond.
{loadposition alex08}Thus, to minimise these system failures, and ensure plenty of dilithium in the crystals of the school’s future warp-class infrastructure, the college decided to “invest in a fully integrated virtualised system that offered operational simplicity and agility to manage increasing workloads and application deployment demands, while ensuring business continuity".
Brendan Vince, head of eLearning and IT Services, Scotch Oakburn College, completely unaware of my vivid Star Trek references, said: “We needed to invest in our IT systems to enhance the experience of the college’s staff and students, and ensure this offering was competitive.
"We needed a partner that understood the environment and location in which we work, and when considering potential vendors, Hewlett Packard Enterprise came out on top. The HPE team demonstrated solid expertise in improving the reliability and agility of our systems in a cost effective, single vendor solution, which anyone in the IT team is able to manage.
"The team on the ground are excellent and have provided us with valuable training and technical support services to ensure a successful implementation.”
Clearly, Vince saw HPE as the engine room machine of innovation required to get the job done, and so engaged the company to make it so.
As HPE explains, its “Pointnext” IT services organisation, “tested and developed a flexible solution across its three college campuses, consisting of four HPE hyperconverged nodes (general virtualisation), four HPE FlexFabric 5700 Switch Series and one HPE StoreOnce 5100 unit".
HPE proudly boasts Pointnext “was instrumental in deployment, data migration and testing processes, in conjunction with the College’s IT team. It also undertook the design and installation of a new iSCSI Fabric between Campuses".
As a result, Scotch Oakburn College has repaired the fabric of space-time reliability in its sector of the galaxy, and has “improved staff productivity and decreased its ICT management overheads by at least 25%, due to the self-management nature of the hyperconverged solution".
Indeed, at a time when senior IT specialists were retiring, the college said its shiny “intuitive architecture meant new IT specialists needed less time to get familiar with the solution".
Finally, we are told that “data security and business resiliency have been improved and the modular architecture of the solution also means scaling up for future growth is vastly simplified".
Brendan Sit, HPE’s Technology Evangelist for Software Defined & Cloud Group in Asia Pacific and Japan, said: “Colleges like Scotch Oakburn are facing an increasing need to manage growing workloads simply, securely, reliably and efficiently, to ensure staff can concentrate on teaching and students can focus on learning.
“HPE’s innovative hyperconverged solution has transformed the college’s ability to seamlessly manage a complex infrastructure, reduce complexity, improve operational efficiency and reduce cost, allowing the college to provide innovative student services now and into the future.”
Back to the future – to infinity, and beyond!
