Case Study: Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School achieves dramatic performance gains and 50% storage cost reduction with NexentaStor (Nexenta)

Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School - Customer Case Study

Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School, a selective co-educational school in Faversham with 874 pupils and 100+ staff, faced rapidly growing data demands and an aging Intel SAN that was nearing capacity, slowing performance and not suitable for expansion. With a limited IT budget and a need for virtualization, reliable performance, and low management overhead, the school sought a flexible, cost-effective storage upgrade.

Working with VA Technologies, the school deployed NexentaStor with VMware—two 12TB SANs (24TB raw) connected to three VMware hosts over 10Gb SFP+ as an NFS ESXi datastore, providing CIFS shares, SSD acceleration, snapshots replicated to a secondary unit, and hybrid storage pools. The solution dramatically improved performance, cut storage costs by about 50%, simplified management with automated alerts and reduced admin time, and delivered scalable enterprise features like deduplication and thin provisioning.

Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School

Dave Munro

IT Network Manager