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Case Study

City of Westminster College

College Entrance
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  • Sector

    Education

  • Services

    IT Consultancy, Support

  • Solution

    Server Virtualisation, Storage Software

  • Platform

    MS Exchange, KEMP Load Balancers, VMware vSphere, EMC SAN

The City of Westminster College (CWC) is a leading Further Education college in central London. The College offers wide choice of academic, vocational and professional courses to students aged 16-18 and to adults.

In terms of core IT infrastructure, CWC operate VMware vSphere server virtualisation and VMware View desktop virtualisation technologies, primary storage resides on an EMC SAN and Paddington Green is the main data centre location, supporting around 800 staff and over 7,000 students. There is a secondary campus at Queens Park, along with several smaller satellite sites.

Challenge

City of Westminster College (CWC) needed to:

  • Upgrade their Microsoft Exchange environment from 2 physical servers to a consolidated and virtualised platform
  • Expand their usage of Microsoft Exchange to take advantage of resource scheduling (for room and facility booking), shared calendars and improved mailbox management

Solution

  • Project design and planning, support and remote monitoring by SysGroup
  • Microsoft Exchange upgrade
  • KEMP VLM load balancer – to provide seamless access to email even if a server fails
  • VMware vSphere server virtualisation
  • EMC SAN
  • Support for 1,000 users and incorporates 4 mailbox databases
  • DAG functionality for high-availability of user mailboxes
View of Westminster

Result

The solution created for City of Westminster College delivered:

  • Better site resilience through the DAG configuration
  • Greater uptime with upgraded Microsoft Exchange, and improved mailbox management
  • Shared calendars improved collaborative working
  • The upgrade of Exchange led to better usage of new features

Testimonial

We are really pleased with the new Exchange infrastructure and worked in close partnership with SysGroup to implement a highly available and resilient email platform...We value SysGroup’s SP Managed IT services for the mix of on-site technical consulting and remote monitoring services.

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