Founded in 1838, the RLSB has a long and distinguished history in helping blind and partially sighted people to achieve their goals in education, training and employment. Today, the RLSB runs a specialist nursery, school and college from their educational campus in Sevenoaks and Adult Support Services from Central London.

The RLSB is committed to expanding their support services for adults, including employment, housing and other community activities to help people to live as independently as possible and to play a full role in society.

David Taylor (ICT Manager) at RLSB initially engaged System Professional to carry out a VMware Capacity Planning exercise on his physical server estate. David wanted to implement a new virtual infrastructure within the charity, but was keen to ensure best practice guidelines were followed around the planning and design process.

Once the VMware Capacity Planner outputs had been assessed by Bruce English and Johnathan Wates of System Professional, they then helped David with the subsequent design of a new SAN and virtual infrastructure. This was based on VMware’s vSphere technology, with 3 x physical hosts and a HP MSA 2012i SAN platform.

The introduction of centralised storage was key, since it allowed David and RLSB to take advantage of the key VMware enterprise features such as vMotion, High Availability (HA), Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS) and Fault Tolerance. This enabled RLSB to ensure greater resilience and DR capability for their key production services.

David was impressed with the System Professional approach, technical delivery and ongoing support: “We always put large projects like this out to tender and System Professional beat two much larger organisations to win the contract based on Bruce’s in-depth knowledge and Johnathan’s excellent customer care. The deployment has been extremely successful and we will be working with them on future developments.”