DataCore Software has announced that the largest further education (FE) college in Wales -- Coleg Gwent -- has chosen DataCore Software to provide a virtual infrastructure for the college. Based in Southeast Wales, Coleg Gwent is the largest FE college in Wales, consisting of six campus sites as well as two satellite IT centres. Currently the institution has over 35,000 students and approximately 1,500 staff.

The campus sites of Coleg Gwent are all linked by a wide-area network (WAN). Originally, the network operating system was based on Novell Netware, using a third party email product on servers with internal disks. In order to more easily integrate with newer applications, the IT team at Coleg Gwent made the decision to migrate to Microsoft Exchange. DataCore Partner Viglen Storage Group won the tender from Coleg Gwent to deliver a SAN and migrate from Novell to Microsoft under an initiative known as the Prometheus project. As part of this migration, it was also determined that a new system needed to meet the objective of increasing storage capacity. Because Coleg Gwent had carefully monitored the use of its storage capacity, it recognised that a storage area network (SAN) was needed to meet the 70 percent year-on-year increase of disk usage. It was further determined that the project needed to encompass a means to better protect the institution's data assets, whereby data did not all reside in one physical location.

Viglen Storage Group has been a valued partner to Coleg Gwent for a number of years and won the tender on their ability to deliver these requirements on budget. Viglen recommended a DataCore SANmelody-based solution, because, according to Carl Gleeson, Viglen's business development manager, "Coleg Gwent needed to replicate between two sites each with a different storage platform and DataCore has the only products that can do this within the institution's budget." Once initiated, the Prometheus project consisted of three stages: SAN installation, upgrading the NOS and installing MS Exchange, and finally replicating the data to another site on separate storage platforms with minimum latency.

A SANmelody solution now provides high availability to Coleg Gwent through its synchronous mirroring and automatic failover on the main Pontypool site as well as replicating the data to the college's Esk site to provide a Disaster Recovery solution to meet the institution's needs. The virtual infrastructure provided by the solution gives Coleg Gwent the flexibility and hardware independence they wanted, enabling them to have a future based on open choice. Evan Smith, assistant head of IT at Coleg Gwent commented, "The SAN has had no visible impact on the network performance and has improved the performance in retrieving data. With a growing number of students and staff, the need to increase capacity was paramount. Viglen introducing SANmelody has met our requirements -- it is very simple to use and gives us a platform for the future."

Coleg Gwent illustrates the demand for low cost disks with high functionality. Evan Smith, assistant head of IT at Coleg Gwent commented, "We definitely made the right choice as it has given us the foundation and flexibility for the future to add more disks of our choice. Moreover, our SAN is now safe and secure. The project's costs were in line with what we expected. However, the deployment has given us true security concerning our data. It is hard to put a price on the resilience that this system now affords our enterprise."

DataCore reports that the Coleg Gwent requirement underscores the current trend of more and more customers getting wise to the fact that hardware is a commodity and demanding hardware that meets their business needs at the price commiserate with its commodity status. "We are very pleased that Coleg Gwent selected our solution for a virtual storage infrastructure," said Nick Broadbent, UK managing director of DataCore Software. "Our goal has always been to enable choice by being hardware independent. This has allowed Coleg Gwent to deploy two different storage brands to meet their business requirements."