Walsall College selects Hitachi Data Systems

Hitachi Data Systems will be helping one of the UK’s leading further education institutions, Walsall College, to deliver new IT services to over 7,500 students using its Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) Select platform.

Following a review of its IT infrastructure, the college’s IT department found that its previous storage infrastructure was not delivering the acceptable performance, scalability and reliability needed for its students and staff. With courses running at weekends and during holiday time, the demand created a 24/7 working environment, which also became a burden for the college’s lean IT team to manage.

Tony Reid, senior director at Hitachi Data Systems UK said, “We are delighted to be working with Walsall College, as our solution aligns with their requirements perfectly to help them to better deliver IT services to their students and staff, as well as support the future growth of the college.”
Walsall College chose systems integrator, Viglen, and Hitachi Data Systems as providers of its converged infrastructure solution – comprising Hitachi UCP Select – offering the college a highly reliable, unified, best-of-breed solution for storage, servers, networking and software management. The single management platform will also reduce the burden on the IT team by consolidating the management of different systems.

The preconfigured and validated platform by Hitachi Data Systems ensures that Walsall College is able to quickly deploy and support a system that hosts mission-critical applications, including Microsoft® Exchange and SharePoint® applications, course data, and a wide range of rich education applications.

Chris Evans, IT director at Walsall College, said, “As one of the UK’s leading further education establishments as recognised by Ofsted, we had to ensure that our students not only benefit from a good quality education, but are also supported by a reliable, high-performing IT service. Hitachi UCP Select offers us a robust storage infrastructure, and the fact that it’s a converged solution allows us to manage the entire system easily and have it scale with us as we grow”.

Students and members of staff will benefit from a 24/7 remote monitoring service, which will identify problems before they escalate. The IT team will value a single support contract from HDS, which provides one source for technical assistance for all the systems within the converged solution.