21 August 2017

Scale says its HC3 platform has reduced management time by more than 50 per cent for the school’s IT department.

Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) will use a Scale Computing system to “dramatically” simplify its storage infrastructure and guarantee disaster recovery capabilities.

The school initially built its IT environment using a server BladeCenter chassis and SAN implementation based on Microsoft’s Hyper-V failover cluster technology. However, the infrastructure was ageing and becoming increasingly difficult to manage. 

Following a successful proof of concept, LSTM opted for Scale Computing’s HC3 cluster as well as a disaster recovery cluster for high availability, cloning, replication and snapshots, providing complete business continuity. 

Scale says its platform has reduced management time by more than 50 per cent, adding that its simplicity has allowed the school to focus on other areas of business, thus saving time and money.

“With Scale, we don’t have to worry about the underlying operating system, this is all taken care of,” says Matthew Underhill, IT team leader at the school. “Previously, if there was an issue with any of our servers, we had to spend hours troubleshooting. But Scale has completely streamlined this process and we don’t have to worry about the everyday management of our systems.”

HC3 has also delivered the added benefit of replication. Through regular snapshots, backup testing has become simplified, allowing the institution to guarantee business continuity. Underhill says that in the event of a disaster, VMs can be up and running again within five minutes.