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

Queen Elizabeth's Grammer School - Customer Case Study

Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School, a selective co-educational school in Faversham with 874 pupils and over 100 staff, faced an urgent storage challenge: an aging Intel SAN that was running out of capacity and slowing performance. With limited IT budget and a need for a flexible, easy-to-manage solution that wouldn’t overwhelm staff, the school engaged VA Technologies to find a cost-effective upgrade.

The school deployed two NexentaStor SANs (two 12TB units = 24TB raw) supporting its VMware environment over 10Gb links, providing NFS-backed ESXi datastores, CIFS shares, regular snapshots and on-site replication. The result was dramatically improved performance, about 50% lower storage costs, reduced management time thanks to automation and simpler administration, and a scalable hybrid storage platform that can grow with the school.

Queen Elizabeth's Grammer School

Dave Munro

IT Network Manager Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School