Preston College

About Preston College

Preston College in Lancashire is a thriving centre of higher education, and its students regularly go on to study at some of the UK’s leading universities. It offers a wide range of A-level and vocational courses, providing a popular entry point for adults looking to return to education.

The challenge

Preston College wanted to improve enterprise efficiency to meet an increasing need for IT. It aimed to centralise storage and virtualise servers, reducing management time and power use.

College consolidates IT by around 83 per cent with virtualised solution

Preston College has significantly reduced its server infrastructure with Dell. The college has replaced 60 servers with nine virtualised Dell PowerEdge R610 servers with Intel® Xeon® processors 5520 series, running VMware® vSphere™ server software. “We have consolidated our server infrastructure by around 83 per cent as a result of our Dell solution from Nviron,” says Greenwood. The servers support various virtualised applications, including Microsoft® Exchange Server. Greenwood says: “We can maintain high availability more easily with our virtualised solution from Dell. If there’s a problem with one of the physical machines, we can move its virtual servers to another one of the hosts in minutes. Disruption is minimal.”

Business benefits

• College reduces servers by around 83 per cent with a virtualised solution.

• Power use was cut by around 37 per cent with Dell and Intel.

• IT personnel focus on strategy with enterprise-efficient storage.

• The customer gains storage to meet multiple requirements.

• IT team maximises performance with responsive support.