Case Study: St Richard’s Catholic College achieves 40% lower TCO and sub-25-second log-ons with Scale Computing HC3

St Richard’s Catholic College - Customer Case Study

St Richard’s Catholic College, a 50‑year school transitioning from print to digital learning, faced an aging, over‑engineered EMC data center that caused slow log‑ons, frequent hardware failures, unreliable backups and high support costs. With a lease expiring and a new 10 Gb campus network planned, IT needed a cost‑effective, scalable, simple solution that would raise performance, availability and reduce CapEx/OpEx.

The college deployed Scale Computing HC3, clustering systems in hours and virtualizing 13 physical servers into two 4‑node HC3 clusters with a secondary DR site. The move cut total system cost by about 40% versus renewing EMC, reduced rack space and cooling by roughly half, and improved log‑on times from ~2 minutes to under 25 seconds. Backups (40 TB daily plus four incremental runs) now run with no performance impact, HA and replication provide robust DR, and the stable platform has freed IT to deploy CCTV, IP telephony and other campus innovations.

St Richard’s Catholic College

Mark Lane

Systems Manager, St Richard’s Catholic College