The Institute of Development Studies is a leading global charity for research, teaching and communications on international development.

The Institute is home to approximately 100 researchers, 70 knowledge services staff, 65 support staff and about 200 students at any one time. But the IDS community extends far beyond, encompassing an extensive network of partners, former staff and students across the development community worldwide.

Following a previous successful deployment of a HP MSA SAN and VMware solution, System Professional were invited back to IDS to help the internal IT team with an upgrade of the virtual environment to the latest vSphere release.

Adrian Scarle (IT Support Officer at IDS) explained that "We were looking to add extra storage to our SAN using VMware and wanted to use the System Professional technical team to give an overview of what is possible with vSphere, specifically regarding replication of VMs / data to a node in another building. As part of this technical assessment, we were also looking for help with a problem concerning our blade chassis iLO ."

Following a 2 day technical consulting exercise, Adrian expressed his satisfaction with the work carried out by Bruce English, System Professional's Senior Technical Consultant. "Once again, we found that working with System Professional was a pleasure. Not only was the upgrade performed efficiently, with zero downtime, but we were then introduced to some of the new features - which we could implement immediately. Bruce also had some suggestions for improving our current configuration, which made better use of existing hardware and improved system stability. We look forward to working with System Professional again in the future."