An SMB's story: 'IBM? We've been a customer for 15 years and they couldn't be bothered to talk to us'

When Barnsley College was looking to replace its SANs it turned to incumbent vendor IBM - and was disappointed by the response

When Barnsley College was looking to upgrade or replace its storage area networks (SANs) that were getting "a bit long in the tooth" you'd have thought the incumbent vendor IBM would have fallen over itself to offer a good deal. After all, the college had recently virtualised its infrastructure and was running on IBM BladeCenter servers. Not a bit of it says Mark Kendrick, head of IT services.

"To be honest IBM have been non-existent," he says. "We've been a customer for 15 years and they couldn't be bothered to talk to us."

The college educates 9,500 students and employs 800 staff. Can IBM really consider that too small to bother with?

"That's certainly how it feels. Unless you're a really big player they're not interested in talking to you," he says. "I don't know why, maybe it's because the server side has gone over to Lenovo."

IBM's loss is Tegile's gain. Kendrick is in the process of replacing four IBM DS3200 SANs with Tegile HA2100 hybrid flash arrays, each with 22TB of capacity including 600GB of flash. These will provide the main storage functions, disaster recovery and backup. Currently the two systems are running in parallel, but by the sound of it he couldn't be happier to see the back of the SANs.

"They were supposed to be eight gigabyte fibre channel, but we had to step that down to four gig because of incompatibility issues," he says. "Then there was the licensing. Even when the kit's good you have to pay for all the extras. It's extortionate. And replacing the disks doesn't come cheap either."

Alternative solutions investigated, such as NetApp, also suffered from complex licensing terms, Kendrick says. By contrast, the Tegile model is very simple: "When you buy the box everything's licensed. In terms of replication and deduplication, all that's in."

One of the advantages that Kendrick noticed immediately with the hybrid flash arrays was the pre-caching capabilities.

"It's a lot more responsive," he says. "We pre-cache student roaming profiles, which were always an issue before. This has allowed us to get login times down from three and a half minutes to 30 seconds. Students expect everything to be instant these days. They don't want to wait three-and-a-half minutes to log in to a PC."

Another significant increase in the performance has been possible due to the compression capabilities of the new arrays.

"We're fully virtualised in terms of our server infrastructure, and when we put the VMware servers onto the Tegile box we were seeing deduplication ratios of 80 to 90 per cent," Kendrick says.

The college is constructing a disaster recovery centre as part of a new sixth-form building and will be purchasing another two Tegile arrays for this purpose.

"We're getting an HA2100 and an HA3100, which will then replicate from site to site giving us true disaster recovery facilities within the new site. We have got disaster recovery facilities already but a typical backup can take eight to 12 hours, whereas on the Tegile arrays it takes 30 minutes to an hour. So the time has drastically come down. The compression and pre-caching just speeds things up so much."

Currently, the Tegile arrays are are supporting the VMware virtual machines, Exchange, file servers, SQL databases, domain controllers and shared areas for staff. When the SANs are finally retired at the end of this year an annual saving of £30,000 should be possible, by Kendrick's reckoning, assuming a lifetime of eight to 10 years for the Tegile arrays.

"A reduction in spend is always good, because they keep cutting my budget every year," he jokes.

Kendrick is also hopeful that the college's document management system - which was "supposed to provide substantial disk savings but instead it just grows and grows and grows" - will also be more manageable when moved onto the Tegile arrays.

Barnsley College, Kendrick says "always likes to be at the forefront of technology". So is he happy with the way the infrastructure is developing, moving away from being primarily an IBM house?

"I am," he says. "Makes a nice change, doesn't it?"