Credit: HPE
Data#3 has extended its relationship with Hobart-based education provider, The Friends’ School, after replacing its existing HPE storage infrastructure with a newer version.
The existing system for the school, which used HPE disk arrays, had nine months left before reaching its end of life support, sending the school to investigate a number of storage options.
Eventually it came down to two providers where cost, technical capability and trusted relationship were some of the top considerations.
Following a competitive tender, The Friends’ School system administrator, Klaus Dengal, said it selected Data#3 based on their relationship with the education provider, their competitiveness and services, using HPE Nimble Storage HF20H Array.
“It was an older system, and our strategy is to upgrade before things fall apart,” Dengal explained.
“As equipment ages, there is a higher rate of disk failures. After four to five years, we should replace the hardware.”
While any problem disks were replaced by HPE within a 48-hour service agreement, it did create an additional administration overhead within the school's IT department, and importantly, as new learning systems were implemented, this also created heavier demands on storage systems.
The school also extended its capacity through using cloud storage to complement its on-premises solution, as per its applications demand.
“We wanted HPE Nimble Storage after seeing its capabilities, and it’s inside architecture. We could know exactly how our storage is performing, when it was reaching the end of its capacity, and it offers more intel than other options,” he said.
“Because the HPE Nimble Storage machine is sending heartbeats to the cloud, we receive email quicker than our monitoring systems can tell us about issues. It creates an auto ticket, and we have a call from an engineer asking if we need help.”
