Farnborough College of Technology (FCT) provides vocational and technical education and training across a broad spectrum of needs – from basic skills programmes and GCSEs to degree and Postgraduate courses. The main Farnborough campus is based in Boundary Road, and is home to around 9,500 full-time and part-time students.

System Professional initially sponsored a series of Storage and Virtualisation technical workshops to help FCT with their strategic IT planning process. These exercises involved both Stuart French (Deputy Computer Services Manager) and Paul Kelly (Computer Services Manager) from FCT, along with Johnathan Wates and Bruce English from System Professional. The workshop sessions covered some in-depth technology reviews, a white board session, together with various solution design and architecture scenarios.

FCT issued a formal ITT to a number of short-listed suppliers and used a scoring matrix to assess the various tender responses. Stuart French explained how “We chose System Professional as our preferred partner since we felt their solution design was excellent and competitively priced. It offered us the resilience we were looking for along with future expansion capabilities. We were also impressed by their technical ability and track record in the Education sector.”

Stuart and the IT team at FCT wanted to implement the new solution over a 2 Phase project cycle. Phase 1 saw the installation of 3 x VMware vSphere ESX hosts, VMware vCenter and a HP MSA2324i G2 SAN, while Phase 2 involved the implementation of a replicated DR solution to a secondary campus location. This was based on the Veeam Backup & Replication software technology and allows FCT to provide image-based replication of their Virtual Machines (VMs) off-site for disaster recovery purposes.

Stuart stressed how “Overall we are very happy with the work that was carried out by System Professional. We were especially impressed with their storage and virtualisation knowledge and really benefited from Bruce English’s technical expertise on this project.”

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