Yesodey Hatorah Girls School

Yesodey Hatorah Girls School

Secondary school revels in new reliable and resilient ICT estate

Yesodey Hatorah Girls is a voluntary-aided secondary school for girls only, serving the Orthodox Jewish Charedi community of Stamford Hill, London and has over 300 pupils on its roll. SBS has provided ICT, MIS and Finance services since 2005.

The school’s objectives

Yesodey Hatorah wanted to find a solution to an ageing ICT infrastructure that was suffering with a lack of disk space and system memory.

The school was looking to consolidate the MIS, Curriculum, Anti-Virus and Email functions – spread across four different HP Servers – onto two new physical servers and four virtual machines. The new environment had to realise the school’s need for cost-effectiveness and scalability.

How SBS services helped

SBS proposed a solution which aimed to replace the HP servers with two Dell models, running the latest Citrix XenServer ‘virtualisation’ software and connectivity to a 5.4TB Storage Area Network (SAN).

"The project was completed during a half-term break and had minimal impact on the school. It was a very smooth implementation and resulted in a much more resilient and effective ICT environment”.

The impact

The old Windows 2003 servers were upgraded to server 2008 and all user data and programs transferred to the newly-built SAN. The new Dell PowerEdge R710s were configured with the multi-pathing feature, which allows the Virtual Machines to be transferred seamlessly from one physical server to another, in the event of problems. Yesodey Hatorah now enjoys workload balancing for efficient use of the hardware.

Next steps

Yesodey Hatorah has continued to renew its SBS contracts annually and has benefited from a reliable and resilient ICT estate. The school has recently upgraded their entire network from 10/100MBPS to gigabit  speed.