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UPDATE
IN PRACTICE
FOCUS ON
HELP DESK
SOLUTION-DRIVEN So fictitious rivalries aside, when the two schools decided to collaborate more formally, they were facing similar challenges: rapidly growing data volumes and tightening budgets. Both, independently, upgraded their storage systems, but then they came across a problem: They each needed a disaster recovery strategy but the budgets were just not available to buy a second solution. “We needed something that was very scalable, also at the same time fit into our budget,” remembers Holder. After discussions with their IT partner and each other, the two schools in Plymouth took a radical step to save money but still have access to the latest technology: they are using each other’s solutions as back up. Picking a shared service they have the best onsite IT infrastructure and can afford an offsite data recovery solution in the shape of network attached storage (NAS) on each respective school site. “So each school has a NAS storage box at each other’s school,” Holder explains. “He has his own; I have my own.” Wilkie explains more: “We put our own disks in there as part of our initial purchase but the scalability of the solution means what we put in as part of our initial purchase leaves oodles of spare space to just drop extra disks in.”
“Technically, you’ve got your own areas, but at the end of the day, you’re giving each other the seed to grow your own tree”
FISCAL PRESSURES But what was the motivation behind the sharing in the first place? “It’s a way of trying to work out how to deal with the ever-increasing costs of providing disaster recovery for schools,” explains Wilkie. “We all live in such an age where losing anything scares the life out of people and with systems in schools becoming ever more complex and ever more like business systems, and needing to run 24/7, you can’t afford to take your system offline for a time to back it all up. It needs to be able to run continuously.” Holder adds: “Financially, you’ve got to look at where schools are, you know, decreasing budgets, so we had this unused space as part of our future growth, but at the minute, we [thought]: ‘Well, we could use that for each other.’” He continues: “It’s saving us money of having to go to another company and saying: ‘Can you take some of our data off site and hold it securely somewhere else?’ We don’t have to do that.” These private companies, says Wilkie, “are not cheap, not by any
stretch of the imagination and on top of that you’ve still got to buy something to host your own back-ups on site”. He explains: “What we’re doing here is buying one solution that backs up our own data, but then buying disks to put in somebody else’s solution down the road to back up our data there as well. But that’s not a lost cost, whereas buying it from one of the online providers is a subscription, it’s a lost cost, we don’t physically own anything there, all they’re doing is loaning space to us. With this, we actually physically own the box in our school, we own the disks that we’re putting in their box.” Security is always a concern, but the two schools have it covered. “I don’t get access to his data, he doesn’t get access to mine,” says Holder. “You’ve got to tick those worries.” Furthermore, if either school needed to get their data back in a hurry, they have complete control over it. In short, it’s a unique solution that Holder sums up well: “What we’re
kind of doing is making each other’s school a cloud.” Wilkie adds: “It’s a local version of what all the providers that do back-up nationally are, we’re just doing it ourselves.” But it’s more than just a storage solution. Collaborating like this allows the two schools to partner up in other ways too. “We were talking this morning about a purchase of some hardware to support my school and Gary’s looking at a project for a similar thing and is asking what I did,” says Wilkie. “We’ve done that multiple times.” This, says Holder, is not just something he and Wilkie do, but a trend among IT managers and members of EduGeek the country over. “Technically, you’ve got your own areas, but at the end of the day, you’re giving each other the seed to grow your own tree,” says Holder. “Sometimes you might take their idea, change it a little bit and make it work for you.”
april 2013 \
www.edexec.co.uk
School profiles
School: Stoke Damerel Community College Location: Plymouth Type: Specialist college for maths and computing and is also a Raising Achievement Partnership college. Students: 1,500 pupils aged between 11- and 18-years-old
School: Marine Academy Plymouth Type: State-funded specialist secondary school with three sponsors: Plymouth University, Cornwall College and Plymouth City Council. The academy’s specialism is the marine environment and encompasses science and engineering. Its key focus is on the employment pathways, which are integral to a marine environment. Students: 1,023 pupils aged 11–18
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