Windermere School replaces SAN and Hyper-V Cluster for Microsoft and DataON Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) - Xces

CUSTOMER STORY
     Windermere School replaces SAN and
     Hyper-V Cluster for Microsoft and DataON
     Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI)

Windermere School – Vincit qui se Vincit.
One conquers, who conquers oneself.

Windermere School – established in 1863 – is located in the heart of England’s Lake District
National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The School is split across three campuses on
over fifty acres of land. The Elleray Campus is the Infant and Junior site (ages 3 to 11) and the
Browhead Campus is the Senior School and Sixth Form site (ages 11 to 18). The School also
has its own Royal Yachting Association (RYA) Watersports Centre on the shores of Lake
Windermere. In 2018, Hodge Howe Watersports Centre became a British Youth Sailing
Recognised Club by the RYA for its race training, becoming the first school in the UK to earn
this status.

Windermere School is all about                  In addition, the existing hardware was out
                                                of warranty, making it for Windermere
– challenging to excel
                                                School obvious to look for a new Hyper-V
Windermere School’s vision is to be the best    based solution to create a more workable
small school in Britain. They strive for        experience.
excellence in all things, and to inspire and
challenge their students to reach beyond        Windermere contacted DataON via a chat
themselves, so they leave proud of their        on the its website. Through DataON,
achievements. With a mission to inspire         Windermere came in contact with XCES, its
students     to     be     confident     and    Premium Partner in Europe. “XCES was
compassionate, Windermere School has            confident with the technology and gave me
deep-rooted aims and values to live up to.      confidence in an Azure Stack HCI solution with
                                                Windows Server 2019, where other companies
Windermere School was looking for a             just wanted to configure me a solution and
replacement of its current SAN & servers to     pay them money,” said Hitchen.
continue to achieve all of its ambitions. The
servers     showed        their  age      and
misconfiguration in the setup and took up
much space for such a small school. Darren
Hitchen, Network Manager at Windermere
School, explained: “Administering servers was
becoming more and more time consuming
and frustrating. When working on a server, we
could sometimes click on a button and the
server would just sit there”.

  “XCES was confident with the technology and
    gave me confidence in an Azure Stack HCI
   solution with Windows Server 2019, where
    other companies just wanted to configure
      me a solution and pay them money.”

      Darren Hitchen - Network Manager at
              Windermere School

The Solution – Microsoft and
DataON
By looking at the needs and wishes based
on a live optics report, a 2-node DataON
HCI-212 solution was proposed. Within this
solution, 2x 1.6TB NVMe cache drives and
4x 12TB HDD drives for capacity were
included. XCES follows best practices from
Microsoft to provide the best solution.           Enable excellence through a
Hitchen adds: “It simplified the current host     Microsoft and DataON solution
stack and has super-fast disk speeds in
comparison to the regular hybrid disk array       The best experience is when the DataON
and host solution. The technology is fantastic,   solution surprises the customer and lives up
having all the data that is used frequently in    to their expectations. "The solution enables
super-fast NVMe drives enables us to rule out     us to administer servers with ease now.
disks slowing down the network”.                  Restarting a server takes only 30 seconds. This
                                                  enables us to administer servers during work
In the pre-deployment phase, VM Fleet POC         hours with ease”, said Hitchen.
and stress testing are performed and the
customer deployment package is being              Through Windows Admin Center and the
prepared. Before the actual deployment has        DataON MUST extension, it is possible to
taken place, a pre-deployment meeting is          visualize and manage the cluster from a
held to ensure that the process runs as           single portal. This simplifies remote
smoothly as possible. XCES took care of the       management with virtualized compute,
onsite deployment for Windermere School.          storage, and network components and
“Having their staff onsite to assist in the       enables integration with various Azure
installation    and      configuration    was     services. The complete out-of-the-box
outstanding. The support and service of XCES      solution from Microsoft and DataON
and their staff have been excellent, and they     offered by XCES has prepared Windermere
are super friendly and very knowledgeable”.       School for a successful future in the field of
                                                  IT.

DataON | IT Products | Hardware Support Services
XCES was founded in 2002 in the Netherlands and is the result of a partnership with a
common vision: to fulfill your IT needs. XCES has extensive experience with small, medium,
and large hardware solutions, as this has been the core of the company since 2002. Since
2016 we have expanded our portfolio with hybrid cloud solutions from DataON for Azure
Stack HCI.

DataON is a hybrid cloud computing company focused on delivering Microsoft Azure Stack
HCI Solutions. These solutions help companies modernize their IT with Microsoft
applications, virtualization, and data protection. DataON solutions have the highest Microsoft
Azure Stack HCI Solutions certifications.

| XCES BV | +31 318 559 370 | SALES@XCES.NL | WWW.XCESBV.COM |