Client story St Richard’s Catholic College gets best-in-class IT platform with Insight support
By Insight UK / 11 Jan 2022
By Insight UK / 11 Jan 2022
St Richard’s Catholic College, located in East Sussex, offers an inclusive, Christian education to students of all abilities.
The IT team wanted to upgrade to the Nutanix Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) platform, but was concerned about the costs and was not aware of the latest developments with the Nutanix platform.
St Richard’s Catholic College wanted to implement a new IT platform capable of meeting its needs, but was conscious of budget restraints and its minimal knowledge of the available solutions.
The school board had already signed off the budget for the project, so the IT team had no room for negotiation on cost. The board also wanted the solution to be delivered in time for the new academic year. This meant that the project needed to be scoped, tested, and implemented diligently within six weeks.
St Richard’s Catholic College already had an HCI solution in place, but the IT team felt it was not suitable for its needs. It wanted a more resilient platform that would enable it to reduce admin time and leverage new technology for the school.
Given Nutanix’s widely accepted reputation for delivering best-in-class HCI solutions, this was the IT teams’ preferred option. However, following past pricing exercises, the team felt it would be financially out of scope.
St Richard’s Catholic College therefore needed a partner close to Nutanix that would assess the school’s existing IT architecture and design and implement a new HCI platform within its limited budget and timescale.
“We knew that the Nutanix technology would deliver what we wanted, but never thought we’d be able to afford it. Insight showed us how far the Nutanix platform had come since we last assessed it, proposed a solution, negotiated a price that we wouldn’t have thought possible, then deployed it for us.
As well as having a much more robust and scalable infrastructure, we’re saving on admin, too. Complex tasks have been reduced to a couple of clicks. We couldn’t be happier.”
Mr Mike Hollingsworth, IT Manager, St Richard’s Catholic College
St Richard’s Catholic College approached Insight asking for help with replacing and upgrading its IT infrastructure.
The Insight team began by assessing the school’s existing infrastructure. Even though the school’s IT team initially believed that Nutanix (its preferred choice) was beyond its budget, Insight was able to outline the many benefits of opting for the Nutanix NX platform. Insight also recommended that St Richard’s Catholic College should implement the solution on Nutanix’s own hypervisor, which delivers superior security, resilience, and scalability.
Insight chose the Nutanix NX/AHV solution because it is easy to migrate to, easy to manage, has low administration costs and comes with excellent customer support.
The Insight team then negotiated with Nutanix to agree a very competitive price point, bringing it within St Richard’s Catholic College’s pre-allocated budget.
Having deployed the Nutanix platform, Insight helped St Richard’s Catholic College to migrate its storage, compute,and virtualisation workloads to the new infrastructure. The platform now supports the entire school - including students, the leadership and management team, teaching staff, administration, special education, and the chaplaincy team.
As Insight holds the highest level of partner accreditation with Nutanix (Nutanix Cloud Champion), Insight was able to assist St Richard’s Catholic College’s IT team with design, build and implementation – beating the September project deadline by over a month.
St Richard’s Catholic College’s IT team was able to migrate to the IT platform it really wanted – rather than having to compromise to meet budget restrictions.
The IT team was able to implement the new platform in time for the start of term, thanks to Insight’s support and expertise.
The new platform reduces admin, allowing the IT team to view and manage storage, compute, and virtualisation within a single administration console.
St Richard’s Catholic College now has access to a wealth of new business solutions and can easily leverage new technology.
The scalability and interoperability of Nutanix gives St Richard’s Catholic College a future-proof solution that can grow with its needs.
