Case Study - Magdalen College School

Business challenge

1. The first Northampton school engaged Web Services to increase its systems uptime and review individual servers to provide a more consistent network performance
2. In addition they wanted to ensure that staff and pupils maximized their learning time and retained focus on schoolwork
3. Achieving this was not possible with the existing single service infrastructure, with no secure shared areas and problematic deployment.

Our solution

1. We worked closely with the IT team, staff and administration to develop a common network model. This was made up of 18 server configurations servicing > 1000 users, 450 desktops and 130 staff with notebooks
2. A scaleable IT architecture was agreed and developed. This included stabilizing/troubleshooting the wireless Laser Link network and enabling remote access to new secured shared areas to allow internal hosting and management of web based applications by local IT services
3. It took only 35 man days to build a new hard/software infrastructure from project start to the sign off of migrated data for all students and staff
4. This very short timescale was achieved through strong local IT support, clarity of design and the cleansing and testing of each users migrated data and network implementation

The results

1. The increased uptime for staff and students, with the reduced log in times and only authorized access, have been key achievements
2. There is no longer a dependency on a consolidated server that brought the entire network down if it failed, nor on external support.

Reduced costs of licensing, sourcing of systems and hardware result in lower support costs and provides more efficient cost of ownership