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XMA in Partnership with outstanding specialist school

Making a difference to learning

Dorothy Goodman School is an Outstanding (Ofsted 2016) Special School serving pupils from 3-19 and supporting parents and guardians. It caters for pupils with a wide range of special educational needs. In recognition of the diversity of their pupils, the School tailors their curriculum to meet the needs of each individual pupil. This is supported by the School’s extensive equipment and facilities, such as Soft Play Room, Hydrotherapy Pool and Sensory Room, which are all used to support and educate pupils.

The School awarded XMA the contract for the design, supply, delivery, installation, testing, commissioning and ongoing support of the ICT infrastructure. XMA worked closely with Dorothy Goodman School and SEND Specialists, iansyst, to deliver state-of-the-art devices, systems and support.

Exceptional ICT for an exception student body

Pupils and staff use ICT to enable rich communication and expression. “For example, in one class, two pupils with profound communication and physical needs were able to confidently express their choices and engage in meaningful communication with the adults.” Ofsted Report 2016

Sensory rooms and sensory spaces use light and sound or even darkness to enable children with various abilities, including Profound and Multiple Learning Difficulties to develop skills such as switching and cause and effect to colour or hand eye coordination skills, additionally, it supports learners with Autistic Spectrum Disorders to relax or be engaged in their environment. Music linked to light has found to be supportive for either calming pupils or raising their attention levels.

The most common device for pupils is iPad, typically with a ‘voice box’ to ‘speak’ for pupils. From this, many pupils run an application called Grid Player, made by Smart Box. Grid Player is an Alternative and Augmentative Communication (AAC) App that helps people who cannot speak or who have unclear speech to communicate. Pupils create sentences on their iPad that speak aloud.

Pupils with motor disabilities are able to utilise Grid Player and other Smart Box applications using Eye Gaze, which mounts on iPad or Windows tablet.

The range of input devices is as diverse as the pupil population. These include a huge variety of switches (USB, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth), joysticks, trackballs and special keyboards. The goal always being to provide the best possible interface for pupils to express themselves and control their environment.

Google’s speech to text enables other pupils to create documents using speech within Google’s GSuite for Education.

In short, together with the School and XMA’s SEND specialist partner iansyst, the School is able to rapidly draw upon thousands of IT solutions for the needs of each and every child.

ICT challenges and resolutions

The School faces many daily challenges that arise from the variety of needs within an All-through

Special School. They were looking for a partner who can provide flexibility in the delivery of service and one with the expertise to respond quickly to their many needs. We demonstrate this below through some examples of the challenges we have resolved together during our six-year partnership:

The School’ split network made it difficult for information to be accessed and teachers had to navigate around this issue by carrying dongles across all sites to access the network and complete their work.

XMA resolved this problem through clear communication, detailed planning and a thorough execution.

By working with the School’s previous on-site engineer, XMA was able to analyse the issue and build a secure configuration for the ICT systems. This allowed us to join the networks into one unified collaboration platform. Our solution enabled teachers to have easy and instant access to the network regardless of the site and without the provision of dongles, which is better for data access and security. This meant that all educators were able to work more efficiently to create and deliver engaging lessons.

With difficulty logging in across different sites for pupils and teachers due to different systems,

XMA consolidated all usernames and passwords across all sites on one domain, which allowed for a more streamlined and secure logging in process.

The School site spreads across five different locations, two main sites – the upper school and a lower school – with three inclusive satellite bases located on the sites of local mainstream schools.

The School’s XMA Technician Tom is involved in liaising with all existing stakeholders, across all 5 sites and those of the mainstream schools. This means that Tom has to be organised in documenting and reporting his conversations and agreements so that he can relay accurate information and advice for all interested parties. He is responsible for coordinating the relevant departments at XMA and updating the Service Desk system for the purposes of resiliency and escalation.

Chelmsford College used XMA during their redevelopment to deploy Viglen devices throughout their new media suite.

XMAs technical knowledge has helped Barnsley Academy successfully refresh and transform its server infrastructure so it can better support the IT requirements of its 1,000 students and staff.

The success of a major IT project is often due as much to how the solution was implemented – as to what exactly was put in place. That’s the opinion of Andy Mellor, network manager at Barnsley Academy, which was why when the Academy decided to refresh its server infrastructure he chose to partner with IT provider XMA.

Mr Mellor said: “A certain proportion of our IT budget is allocated to replacing hardware. In the case of our servers, once they get to four years old we automatically refresh them. So we put the project out to tender and shortlisted three organisations. XMA was one of those companies.”

“In all honesty, each was proposing very similar solutions. There was not much to choose between them but I picked XMA because of a feeling. It was a feeling I got about the organisation’s people. I thought I could work with them the best. I felt comfortable with them. It was mostly just about the impression they gave me.”

Better storage and back-up

Since then, XMA has put in place a SAN installation and server virtualisation project for the Academy. Engineers set up a new SAN and used three servers as a virtualisation platform. Another server acted as a domain controller, management and backup server while the fifth ran the Academy’s MIS solution.

Mr Mellor said: “We used all physical servers before but virtualisation is where technology is headed so this was the next step for us. It has dramatically reduced the amount of energy and space we need to run our servers. The new infrastructure is also faster and more efficient. Our overheads are much reduced and the management of the Academy’s IT systems are easier – with just one place to look at all the servers.”

Mr Mellor added: “One of the key advantages is that the new infrastructure has enabled us to restore our server in 30 minutes where before it would have taken a full day. Disaster recovery time is nothing compared to what it was before and that’s a massive bonus.”

“The back-up is also fantastic. My back-up window used to take 30 to 40 hours but now it’s three or four. That’s a massive difference because it enables me to make more storage available to our users. The staff and students don’t notice any difference but the new system has made it so much easier for me to manage with everything being in the same place.”

Experts on hand

Mr Mellow said XMA’s technical expertise was one of the major advantages of using the company. He said: “The technical guys have been great. They were very personable and their knowledge is fantastic. If I ask them to show me anything they are very accommodating. We are a small team here even though the Academy is growing quickly and so access to this technical expertise gives us a step up.”

“In fact, this technical knowledge was on display from the very start of the project.” Mr Mellor explained: “XMA was the only company that sent a technician to the initial consultation rather than just a sales person. I found that a benefit. The engineer had a look at our system and simply talked through what we needed. All the other companies only sent sales people which gave the meeting a very different vibe.”

An on-going partnership

The IT project is now up and running successfully at Barnsley.

“XMA provides the hardware and the systems support for everything they provide. That is also going well. We have had a couple of issues but they have been fantastic in sorting it out. The company has a large knowledge nase and the engineers working with us have just got on to it with no fuss. They have answered any questions and everything has gone very smoothly.”

Improving access to information

One of the UK’s largest educational facilities, City College Manchester supports a growing number of students from around the world, and over 1,200 employees. In order to provide 24/7 access to essential materials and services online, the college needed a data storage and protection system to support this.

The challenges

“As we increased the number of college services, we had to continually buy more servers and storage to keep pace with the data this produced. IT management costs were soaring, and we were worried about network integrity as we didn’t have consistent disaster recovery and backup processes.”

“At the time, all our data storage was direct attached. Each server had its own storage that couldn’t be accessed by other servers. This just wasn’t efficient.”

John Goulden, Network Support Manager, City College Manchester

City College Manchester began the process of selecting a vendor to build a storage area network (SAN) that would link each of its four major campuses and partner sites across the city.

“Our key requirements were quality of hardware and an ability to scale to meet future needs,” explains Goulden. “Disaster recovery was also critical.”

The solution

City College Manchester selected a complete solution from XMA, a specialist ICT provider to the UK’s education sector. XMA installed and integrated a SAN across the college’s campuses and implemented a disaster recovery suite to ensure data is stored and replicated for quick and simple recovery. XMA also provided training to the college’s network technicians to ensure they were fully utilising the system’s capabilities. The hardware installed comprised two Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 1000 models, one at each of the college’s two main data centres.

XMA states, “By designing and deploying this complex storage solution, City College Manchester can now quickly and securely store and replicate all of their data. It also provides them with a solid platform for growth.”

Implementation was fast and efficient and was completed in just two weeks. City College Manchester is investing in VMware virtualisation tools as part of a server consolidation drive, and XMA ensured that the new storage infrastructure supported this environment.

Network technicians at the college have found the consolidated storage solution easy to use and manage. If they do need assistance on either the hardware or software, support is available around the clock.

The result

“We can now provision storage as and when we need it, which is absolutely brilliant. We’ve never been able to do it so fast,” says Goulden.

The college can also now monitor and manage its storage more efficiently, spotting problems faster and predicting future requirements. This in turn provides students and staff with higher information availability and better access to services and resources, in line with service level requirements.

Technicians have identified significant time savings by being able to perform data replication and backup procedures more efficiently, and reduced downtime means better time efficiency for users, too.

“With XMA’s new setup, if we lost our primary data centre, we could have all the data back within hours,” explains Goulden. “Before, it would have been a nightmare task that would have taken days to recover just some of the lost data.”

“Recently, one of our network volumes was corrupted. In the past we would have spent hours searching through the tape library for the backup, but thanks to the advanced Hitachi software which is built into the solution, we were able to recover it within 15 minutes.”

John Goulden, Network Support Manager, City College Manchester

The college uses a Novell GroupWise e-mail system and, since deployment, technicians have found that a disaster recovery task which used to take several days can now be completed within an hour. Data replication capabilities have also been found to be very robust. Data at the two main campuses is backed up locally, then between each other while data from remote sites is replicated to the two central data centres. This ensures that no matter where information is stored, it is automatically and securely replicated at a different location. The college’s opening hours are extending and a growing body of international students want access to information from anywhere, at any time.

Goulden concludes, “The College is becoming a 24/7 learning environment and its IT infrastructure is now able to support this important shift. At the time of implementation our data requirement was for 3.5TB and this is growing at 50% year on year. It’s a significant mountain to climb, but we are now equipped with the tools we need to meet the challenge.”

Hitachi Data Systems Research-Data Storage Solution gets high marks from Lancaster University.

Addressing ever increasing data demands

As one of the United Kingdom’s top 10 universities, Lancaster University is a research-led institution with an ambitious strategy to become truly globally significant. The university required a robust, high quality and scalable storage and backup solution to support its business applications and research data storage for at least the next five years.

The existing infrastructure was approaching full capacity and unable to continue supporting its growing data demands. The NAS environment (provided by EMC) was reaching maximum capacity and did not have a non-disruptive route for expansion of its research data storage. The existing EMC backup hardware had also reached end of life, and the backup window and tape quantity as at the practical capacity limit.

Delivering improved flexibility and availability

In partnership with Hitachi Data Systems, we utilised the National Server and Storage Agreement framework to provide a solution for Lancaster University that covered SAN, NAS and backup environments.

Migration was completed in two phases, and two separate NAS platforms were proposed for each main data type: user and research data. For cost efficiency, Lancaster University’s user data is now stored in Hitachi NAS Platform (HNAS) with intelligent tiering based on access frequency. To ensure scalability and reliability, research data is stored in a virtualized Hitachi Content Platform (HCP).

HCP is ideal for the management of business-critical information and utilises Hitachi Unified Storage (HUS): HUS 150 via HUS VM. To provide a high-performance gateway and ensure fast file retrieval and additions, research data is presented via HNAS to users with Hitachi Data Ingestor (HDI) across the two data center locations.

With the university’s current environment composed of about 90% virtualized infrastructure, the optimal solution was to consolidate all data into the virtualized HUS VM, a competitive, cost-effective solution that delivered flexibility and scalability. Best-in-industry capabilities were installed across all areas using HNAS and HUS 150, with backup-free architecture put in place for high-performance NAS research data using HCP.

High-performance, resilient technology

Upon installation of HDS solution, a benchmark test proved its high-performance capabilities, superseding IOPS requirements by 250%. The difference was highly notable as end-user services greatly improved, allowing students, faculty members and administrative staff to work more efficiently, access required services, and maximise use of the research data produced by the university.

Due to virtualisation and advanced flash technology, Lancaster University has accelerated application performance and reduced costs. The university also manages capacity and services more efficiently. To meet government guidelines, data retention was important and Lancaster now has the flexibility to support its projected data growth over the coming years.

Supporting cutting edge computer-based research with Viglen HPC

With Intel® Xeon® Gold processors based on the new Skylake architecture, offering significant per- core performance, Lancaster University are able to meet growing and support of a wide range of HPC workloads on premise.

The University of Lancaster is one of the UK’s largest research institutions, so having access to enterprise class HPC power is mission-critical, the university receives more funding through research than through tuition fees alone. The University of Lancaster has been an HPC user for a few years but decided to adopt a more strategic and centralised approach when they began looking at refreshing and upgrading its resources.

Lancaster University chose XMA as a partner to deliver the new HPC resources, which will allow the university to maintain an enviable record in cutting edge computer-based research. The difference is that Viglen products and services are tailor made for each and every client. By weaving together the team’s high level of experience and expertise, with a solution orientated approach to hardware, XMA can deliver on budget and on brief every time.

Why Intel?

HPC platforms—from the smallest clusters to largest supercomputers—demand a balance across compute, memory, storage, and network. The Intel Xeon Scalable platform was designed to deliver and enable such balance with massive scalability—to tens of thousands of cores. From its improved core count and mesh architecture to newly integrated technologies and support for Intel Optane memory and storage devices, the Intel Xeon Scalable platform enables the ultimate goals of HPC—to maximise performance across proved core count and mesh architecture to newly integrated technologies and support for Intel.

Keeping the IT one step ahead of the expanding University

It is vital that IT delivers an infrastructure platform enabling the University to meet the requirements today and in the future. This platform is based on Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) server and storage technologies and VMware Virtualisation software technologies.

To meet the needs of 23,000 students, 5,000 staff and plans for continual growth in the University’s data and services, the University chose us to refresh and expand their core Storage Area Network (SAN) infrastructure utilising the latest HPE 3PAR storage and providing a dual-site, replicated highly available platform.

Increasing the capacity, resilience and performance of IT

In order to respond to the increasing demands being placed on such a large institution, the University’s new technology solutions need to have high capacity, resilience and performance.

The University needed to replace an existing HPE 3PAR T800 that was due to be decommissioned, and also update software on their existing HPE 3Par V400 array enabling cross-functionality between arrays. At the same time, the University also needed to implement a new SAN fabric into the newly commissioned data centre which would support current and future requirements.

The new environment, utilising hardware, software and the SAN Fabric had to connect the existing HPE based infrastructure, providing a dual site, highly available and resilient platform.

One of the challenges that the project faced was that it needed to be invoiced by December but
could not take delivery until the following March. As part of our commitment to excellent service
delivery, we provided a secure bonded warehouse facility at our St Albans Head Office to store the
19 pallets of HPE infrastructure for four months at no additional cost to the University.

Working in partnership with HPE and XMA the University was able to deliver the project on-time and
on-budget.

A tailored solution meeting current and future requirements

The project commenced with a workshop discussing the requirements in detail with Warwick University’s IT Services, HPE and XMA working together, in partnership. It was clear that the requirement was for a tailored solution maximising the investment in existing HPE and VMware infrastructure whilst also being able to meet current and future requirements and expanded to a dual-site deployment.

The University was already using HPE ProLiant Server and 3Par storage, with VMware vSphere virtualisation software delivering a highly virtualised infrastructure which worked.

This made the decision to expand the environment using HPE technology an easy one and the
University decided to expand to a dual-site, replicated environment utilising:
• HPE ProLiant DL560 Servers
• HPE 3Par V400 StorServ Storage
• HPE SAN Fabric Switches
• HPE 3Par StorServ Replication Suite, including Peer Persistence
• VMware vSphere Virtualisation Software

This enabled the University to maximise existing investment and knowledge, reduce risk and provide
a highly available and resilient infrastructure platform to meet current and future needs.

Moving Warwick University into their future IT Infrastructure

The highly available, saleable and manageable infrastructure based on HPE Server and Storage and
VMware Infrastructure has enabled Warwick University to achieve their goal of expanding IT
Services to support today’s requirements as well as future growth and demands.

XMA comes out on top

Ofsted issued a tender for the supply, implementation and ongoing managed support of a Microsoft Private Cloud solution with over 300TB storage, 500 CPU cores and 8TB RAM (plus a smaller platform at a second site). The requirement included fully-managed migration of approximately 300 production and test/dev systems to the new platform, while addressing their need for a number of secure network environments including a combined user acceptance testing environment and a Disaster recovery failover.

Hitachi scores “outstanding”

We recognised that Ofsted required a platform that provided significant computing resource and a highly resilient storage platform. In response, we proposed a Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) comprising automatically-tiered Hitachi Unified Storage (HUS) and CB500 blades based on the latest Intel Sandybridge processors. Core networking (based on Brocade VDX) was included, as was firewalling and load balancing using F5 Big IPs. We addressed the solution requirements in their entirety and provided training and migration services on top of hardware, software and extended managed support for the complete infrastructure stack.

As HDS’ largest public sector partner in the UK market, we recognised this as an ideal fit for the HDS Unified Compute Platform. This was an opportunity to introduce a disruptive yet constructive technology, despite the length of relationship with the incumbent technology partner. Our solution provided to Ofsted replaced the entire existing estate as it hurtled past the end of its economic life.

The migration process, which included virtualising over 100 legacy physical servers (including SQL and Exchange clusters), also required the migration of their on-premis datacentre to a secure remote datacentre, all without any business disruption.

Project success leads to opportunity

On completion of the Infrastructure Refresh project, Ofsted engaged with us to develop the platform further by extending the storage layer to a content platform. We are also involved in consulting on the effective use of its infrastructure to achieve delivery of its regulatory and statutory objectives.

XMA’s technical expertise has proved invaluable for helping Lincoln Minster School install a SAN and carry out a server virtualisation project which has given staff and students a much improved service.

“Having an impressive technical team on the end of the phone was very helpful.” That was the verdict of Simon Cornish, network manager at Lincoln Minster School, after XMA helped the school design and deliver a SAN installation and server virtualisation project. In fact, he attributed much of the final success of the project to the company’s ability to offer sound technical advice at every step of the way.

The solution was designed by XMA after the school decided to explore moving towards a modern virtualisation environment during a hardware refresh. Mr Cornish said: “We were refreshing our server infrastructure and we wanted to virtualise it. Previously our servers were old and tired and out of warranty. We knew virtualisation was the way IT was going but we needed help to move forward with the right solution.”

The entire project ran very smoothly. Members of the XMA team were happy to answer
questions about anything we wanted to know about. We were really impressed.

The school, which caters for 900 pupils across three sites, needed XMA’s help to make sure their plans could become an effective reality. Therefore, XMA designed a solution and installed a cost- effective SAN which enabled the school to reduce its server estate from 15 servers to 4.

Why virtual?

The benefits of virtualisation were clear to Lincoln Minster. Mr Cornish said: “This is the way IT is going. By cutting down our servers from fifteen to four, we have reduced our overheads dramatically and it has also made the management of our IT systems much easier as we only have one place to look at all the servers – rather than having to maintain each separately. Thanks to this project, we have refreshed hardware, our operating systems are up to date, we have more power and, generally, we now have in place a faster, more effective system than before.”

Support for the right solution

However, ensuring the school reaped the benefits of a virtualisation solution was not a foregone conclusion. Mr Cornish said: "We have our own technical team but finding people who were at the next level up was essential. One of my aims was to find a solution provider with good technical expertise.

“Today, both staff and students at Lincoln Minster are enjoying the advantages of XMA’s solution which has proved to be value-for-money, as well as reliable and scalable.”

“We were most impressed with XMA’s technical knowledge. From that point of view, it was absolutely brilliant. I couldn’t have asked for anything more at all. It was quickly apparent that XMA staff knew what they were doing and had the knowledge to help
us.”

A personalised solution

Another reason that Lincoln Minster chose XMA to deliver the solution was because the IT provider was happy to create a solution that was fitted to the school's requirements exactly. For example, the school had already chosen to use HP and Microsoft technology – so XMA ensured this preference was factored into the final design.

Mr Cornish said: “Our account manager made an effort to come and sit down with us and find out exactly what our issues were. By doing so, XMA could plan out exactly what we needed. Now we have a solution that fulfils our needs.”

The solution in action

Today, both staff and students at Lincoln Minster are enjoying the advantages of XMA’s solution which has proved to be value-for-money, as well as reliable and scalable. The system can also support much faster backup times and improved disaster recovery. The solution provides redundancy within the SAN solution through two fibre controllers to service the servers and data traffic and three high performance specification servers to manage data requests to the SAN from the school’s network. A storage server was also installed to backup all data from the main SAN.

Mr Cornish said: “Our storage is improved so the service we can offer our students is much better. What’s more, the staff know they can rely on the IT facilities. In the past we have had complaints about the systems performance. That was not an acceptable situation because if the computers are down, teachers cannot deliver lessons to the standard they want, which is a major problem for any modern school. Now we just don’t have these complaints coming in.”

A smooth implementation

He went on: “The entire project ran very smoothly. Members of the XMA team were happy to answer questions about anything we wanted to know about. We were really impressed. They knew their stuff and because of that we would absolutely use XMA again in the future.”

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.