Wigmore Academy Trust saves around £20K over 5 years on its IT operational expenses (OpEx) by implementing a remotely supported and managed IT infrastructure built around StarWind HCA

PUBLISHED/UPDATED: November 3rd, 2022

We have had the StarWind HCA cluster in for over 4 years, it’s simply
the best decision we have made as regards the school network.
StarWind Support is the best I have worked with in over 15 years in IT.

IT Manager

PROBLEM

Before implementing StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA), Wigmore Academy Trust had a failover cluster consisting of a 3-node SAN with Hyper-V on top. The cost of renewal, complexity of supporting the stack, limited time and expertise in the IT team, and the expense of the SAN and node maintenance forced the organization to look for a hyperconverged platform. The Trust demoed several solutions from various vendors, but only StarWind could provide the ease of use and amazing support, that the organization required.

SOLUTION

Wigmore Academy Trust chose StarWind HCA as it is fully supported by StarWind and has taken away the need for the organization to spend hours monitoring their storage and nodes and allowed them to concentrate on providing user support. Thanks to StarWind HCA, the Trust’s new IT infrastructure has far better performance and 100% uptime. Any issues are picked up by StarWind ProActive Premium Support and can be resolved by StarWind, before the problem becomes visible to the Academy’s IT Team. StarWind HCA allowed Wigmore Academy Trust to save around £7-8 thousand on support costs since the solution was installed. Implementing StarWind HCA also saved numerous hours on setup and countless more on ongoing support, and the organization expects to save around £20,000 over 5 years. Next year Wigmore Academy Trust plans to renew its current HCA and deploy the existing solution on another site.

About the Company

Wigmore Academy Trust is a mixed secondary school located in Wigmore, in the county of Herefordshire, England. Previously a foundation school, in 2007 Wigmore High School joined with Wigmore Primary School, and now also includes nursery school provision. In 2011, the federation converted to academy status.

Company Profile

Education

Contact Person

IT Manager