Founded in 1898, the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) was the first institution in the world dedicated to research and teaching in the field of tropical medicine. With a worldwide reputation for delivering state of the art research combating tropical diseases, LSTM attracts over 600 students each year from 68 countries.
LSTM initially built its IT environment using a Server BladeCenter chassis and SAN implementation utilising Microsoft’s Hyper-V failover cluster technology. The infrastructure was ageing and becoming increasingly difficult to manage. The institution evaluated a number of products in the market before settling on a shortlist of Nutanix and Scale Computing.
Following a successful proof of concept, LSTM opted for Scale Computing’s HC3 cluster and a disaster recovery cluster for high availability, cloning, replication and snapshots, providing complete business continuity. The HC3 cluster has reduced management time by over 50 per cent and its simplicity has allowed the school to focus on other areas of business, saving time and money. The HC3 platform has also delivered the added benefit of replication. Through regular snapshots, back-up testing has become simplified and regular, allowing the institution to guarantee business continuity.
“The Scale solution was perfect for our environment,” commented Matthew Underhill, IT Team Leader at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. “With Scale, we don’t have to worry about the underlying operating system, this is all taken care of. Previously, if there was an issue with any of our servers, we had to spend hours troubleshooting, but Scale has completely streamlined this process and we don’t have to worry about the everyday management of our systems. We also have the added ability to test our backups more regularly and recover VMs within five minutes, ensuring we are back up and running again in the event of a disaster.”
The Scale solution has also saved LSTM over ?80,000 at face value. Underhill concluded: “This is an amazing cost reduction and we can put this money to use elsewhere. In addition to cost savings, we no longer need the knowledge or expertise to deal with growing complex systems, which was becoming a challenge.”
Johan Pellicaan, VP and MD EMEA at Scale Computing commented: “The HC3 platform is designed to offer scalability and simplified management enabling organisations to reduce their operational costs. The Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine is a leading charity institution and we are pleased we to have been able to work with them to offer a cost effective and reliable solution that will provide the school with business continuity.”
