Bridging the divide with HPE
Addressing ever increasing data demands
The Windsor Forest Colleges Group is made up of three college campuses (Windsor, Langley and Egham) all managing different technologies and virtualisation software. Supporting IT for more than one campus and in different locations, presented challenges for the group; with too much physical infrastructure, inconsistent systems, poor service levels and time and resource intensive management.
HPE makes the grade
We worked with the Group to implement an identical 3-node Hyper-V cluster and DPM backup solution into each of the three sites. By integrated best of breed HPE servers and storage, the College gained three major components.
A production environment consisting of a three node Hyper-V cluster with 1024GB RAM and 70TB of shared storage per site that hosted each sites IT services and data, with spare capacity that allows for one site to be replicated to another to form a 3-way mutual Disaster Recovery environment.
A Microsoft System Centre DPM backup solution configured with 60TB usable storage at each site that
provides disk to disk backup for local services and data.
A 3-way mutual disaster recovery environment that allows virtual machines to be replicated between sites
allowing for failover of services should one site become unavailable.
As a result, each site is now able to work independently with local failover clustering and the ability to replicate virtual machines to another site for added resiliency using Hyper-V replica.
