Marathon & Lakelands School

Lakelands School Learns High Availability Is A Breeze

The Organisation

Based in Ellesmere, Shropshire, Lakelands School, Sport & Language College is a successful and oversubscribed 11-16 comprehensive school serving 574 pupils. Lakelands has three specialisms: as a sports college, as a language college and as a specialist provider for physical and sensory needs. To support these roles the school has specialist classrooms, exceptional sports facilities and technology suites, as well as a hall with full stage and performance facilities. Lakelands was judged to be ‘outstanding’ in its 2006 OfSTED inspection, reinforced by high levels of pupil success every year.

The Situation

Capita SIMS (School Information Management System) is a management information system used by Lakelands and 21,000 other schools in 150 local authorities across the UK. SIMS provides a suite of software covering all parts of a school’s administration including curriculum planning, lesson structures, pupil attendance, pupil/parent contact information and learning assessments. It is therefore an essential tool for managing school business processes.

Lakelands School also uses a biometric cashless catering EPOS system – which means schoolchildren scan their fingertips rather than pay with cash or vouchers for school lunches. The use of this technology increases school meal take-up, removes the stigma of free school meal eligibility and frees up staff time previously required supervising lunch voucher purchase and usage.

In May 2009 Damian Edwards, IT Manager at Lakelands School, selected Marathon everRun as his product of choice to protect these critical systems. He explains: “In an educational establishment like Lakelands, we don’t have a huge IT department and we have to work within a given financial budget. We chose Marathon everRun because of its functionality – we can select and protect our most critical applications to ensure they never go down – and because it was more competitively priced than other solutions.”

The Approach

Both SIMS and the cashless catering EPOS systems are Windows based packages, perfect for Marathon high availability protection. Lakelands decided to deploy everRun VM on two physical host servers to protect these applications. This allowed protection of an unlimited number of computing environments, with the flexibility to add further critical systems as required. This was an extremely important option in such a budget-conscious environment and perfectly suited Lakeland’s IT team.

Coupled with any version of the Citrix Xen Server virtualisation tool, Marathon’s everRun leverages the floating nature of a virtual environment. If either or both servers suffer component failure, the computing environments continue to operate. This level of fault tolerance allows IT administrators to repair disk failures, network card outages, etc, without incurring any downtime.

The Results

Thanks to Marathon everRun, Lakelands School’s management processes are robustly protected. Damian Edwards, IT manager, commented: “It’s reassuring to know that we are able to protect our mission critical applications at the click of a button on a simple user interface. It really does make high availability protection an absolute breeze. 24/7 Uptime have always been very informative and responsive when we’ve asked for help. Good business relationships aren’t just about money and ticking boxes; we enjoy great customer service from the 24/7 Uptime team.”