Case Study: Heart of Worcestershire College achieves resilient, cost‑saving software‑defined storage with DataCore Software

Heart of Worcester College’s continued journey with DataCore’s Block SDS solution achieves resource savings, flexible expansion and total peace of mind from the storage layer

Heart of Worcestershire College, a multi-campus further and higher education provider serving over 10,000 students, needed to scale and protect its IT estate after a 2014 merger without costly hardware replacement. The college sought to continue its software-defined storage strategy to support ~200 VMs and 33 TB of synchronously mirrored storage for critical apps (SQL, SharePoint, Moodle, Exchange) using DataCore’s SANsymphony.

DataCore’s SANsymphony was deployed in an active‑active configuration to provide storage pooling, policy-based automated provisioning and multi-tier auto‑tiering from NVMe to SSD and SAS, allowing new hardware and performance boosters to be added non‑invasively. The outcome: continuous application availability with no perceived downtime, four-tier performance for top applications, avoided rip‑and‑replace of HP arrays, and measurable savings (no spend on spinning disks for over four years) while supporting the college’s growing user base — with DataCore helping plan a third node for three‑way mirroring.

Heart of Worcestershire College

Ed Haworth

IT Lead Engineer