Lawnswood School is one of the top performing educational institutions in the UK. Their IT environment supports a workload that is split between approximately 1200 students and 200 staff.  With 1400 people and various programs and files to support, they were in search of something to help extend the life of their hardware and increase performance. They turned to Condusiv®’s V-locity® and Diskeeper® to extend the life of their storage hardware and maintain performance for their students and staff.

“Condusiv’s V-locity software eliminated almost 50% of all storage I/O requests from having to be dealt with by the disk storage (SAN) layer, and that meant that when replacing the old SAN storage with a ‘like-for-like’ HP MSA 2040, V-locity gave me the confidence to make the purchase without having to over-spend to over-provision the storage in order to cope with all the excess unnecessary storage I/O traffic that V-locity efficiently eliminates,”said Noel Reynolds, IT Manager at Lawnswood School. Before upgrading his SAN, Noel was able to extend the life of the HP MSA 2000 SAN for 8 years “thanks to Condusiv’s I/O reduction software”.

Knowing how well the IT environment was performing at Lawnswood School, another school reached out to Noel for help, as their IT environment was almost identical, but suffering from slow and sluggish performance. They also had three VMware hosts of the same specification, the older HP MSA 2000 SAN storage and workloads that were pretty much identical. Noel Reynolds noted that: “They were almost a ‘clone’ school.”

He continued: “I did the usual checks to discover why it wasn’t working well, such as upgrading the firmware, checking the disks for errors and found nothing wrong other than bad storage performance. After comparing the storage latency, I found that Lawnswood School’s disk storage was 20 times faster, even though the hardware, software and workload types were pretty much identical.”

“We identified six of the ‘most hit’ servers and installed Condusiv’s software on them. Within 24 hours, we saw a 50% boost in performance. Visibly improved performance had been returned to the users, and this really helped the end user experience.

A great example of a real-world solution.” Noel concluded

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