Case Study: Uplands Community College achieves near‑instant VDI performance and 50% storage cost savings with DataCore Software's SANsymphony

Uplands regenerates their Virtual Desktop Infrastructure using the combined 10Ps of DataCore's SANsymphony-Vio with Flash Storage

Uplands Community College, a secondary school and sixth form in Wadhurst, East Sussex, faced severe VDI performance bottlenecks as ageing storage hardware struggled to support VMware Horizon and student demand—morning logons could take around five minutes. The college was a long‑term user of DataCore Software and its SANsymphony‑V platform but needed a cost‑effective refresh to eliminate slowdowns without breaking the budget.

Working with partner M‑Tech, DataCore Software upgraded the environment to SANsymphony‑V10 and integrated low‑cost OCZ RevoDrive 960GB SSD cards into a single, highly available storage pool, using SANsymphony’s caching and thin provisioning to accelerate I/O. The result was dramatic: logons and applications now respond in under a second, storage spending dropped by over 50%, 100 virtual desktops can be recreated in under 20 minutes, and IT benefits from simpler, centralized management and scalable capacity.

Uplands Community College

Neil Harris

ICT Support Manager