Mayfield School
St. Leonards-Mayfield School is an independent Catholic boarding and day school for 400 girls in Sussex village of Mayfield. ‘Mayfield girls’ are renowned for achieving some of the highest public examination grades in the UK whilst at the same time developing a love for the performing and creative arts.
Challenge
The School’s IT infrastructure was approaching end of life and had grown organically over recent years. The School wanted to address challenges with their existing IT infrastructure and instigate a rigorous assessment of Mayfield’s longer-term ICT road-map. The student experience was key and any upgrade needed to avoid classroom lesson disruption and enable best-of breed multimedia to support the learning process.
Additionally, the School needed a stronger DR and failover plan to ensure that critical business applications would always be available, and they wanted to address the growing costs of maintenance for their old IT infrastructure.
Solution
After a thorough design and consultation exercise, Mayfield School chose to partner with SysGroup for a managed IT solution. This included:
- VMware vSphere server virtualisation
- HP P2000 SAN shared storage
- Veeam Backup and Replication
- Network monitoring, IT support and help-desk service
Result
SysGroup provided assisted installation training with Mayfield staff during the project implementation phase. On-going IT support services were also arranged to help manage and maintain the new VMware infrastructure and storage platform. The new solution led to these results:
- Ease of management and server provisioning with new virtual infrastructure
- Simplified, robust backup strategy
- Improved DR capability with data replicated to secondary location
- Centralised and improved network administration
- Scalable, resilient IT platform to support future growth
We are delighted with the quality of work delivered by SysGroup. The new virtual environment fully supports Mayfield’s future growth plans and provides a stable, resilient IT infrastructure for all staff and pupils. We wanted to ensure the School achieved best value over a sustained period and the future savings in hardware, maintenance and support costs will realise this aim.
Caroline Barry IT Director
