Manor Lodge School is a private school nestled into the English countryside, about an hour northwest of London. The school frames learning as an adventure, combining rigorous academics with outdoor education to fuel a child’s curiosity and creativity at every step. The curriculum includes innovative outdoor and technology-based learning, exposing students to old-world crafts and practical traditions, as well as a variety of electronic devices and operating systems.
Digital learning occurs in and out of Manor Lodge classrooms and requires instant access from anywhere on the grounds or within the building, but the school’s aging IT infrastructure sidelined lessons. Frequent outages could last an hour or longer, disrupting classes and negatively impacting teachers, students, and administrators. Plans to extend the school’s cutting-edge curriculum were hindered by outdated data infrastructure that was unreliable, unpredictable, and difficult to maintain.
Shifting from Crisis Response to Strategic Planning
The IT team was consumed with putting out fires and knew it was time to modernize the core infrastructure. A full network refresh would eliminate the constant disruptions, smooth the learning process, and support future growth of the curriculum and the school. Updated operating systems would enable the school to deploy stronger security tools for data protection.
Manor Lodge conducted a full inventory of its existing framework and decided to fully transform the infrastructure, ensuring the investment in a strong IT foundation would carry the school forward for years. Focused on high reliability and availability, Hitachi Vantara’s solution with its high standard of engineering and support won over Manor Lodge.
A+ for Availability
Working with IT solution partners Qual and TD SYNNEX, the school deployed Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) G350 with a 100-percent data availability guarantee and high-capacity storage for multiple data types, including images, videos, teaching materials, and student work.
Built-in scalability ensures seamless capacity growth as the school and its data needs increase, while robust data protection mitigates cybersecurity threats and safeguards sensitive student and school data.
The new storage platform has been nearly foolproof. Since the installation, the only outage was the result of a local power cut, and still the infrastructure came back online quickly. Hardware faults and network system crashes have ceased, as automated self-monitoring capabilities proactively find and fix anomalies before they become problematic. Hitachi Vantara engineers notify the Manor Lodge IT team of resolved issues before the latter are aware of them.
The reliability of the new infrastructure has freed the Manor Lodge team to focus on strategic projects, including innovative technology use in the classroom. Teachers and students have uninterrupted access to key teaching resources so lessons are more effective and the quality of learning has improved.
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