East London's Stirling High School has virtualised 80% of its IT environment.
Stirling, which has long been considered an Eastern Cape IT leader, has progressed a long way from the two dial-up Internet connections it had in 2000 - it now has three computer labs, with 120 workstations and 10 servers. The march towards virtualisation is being led by Leonard Brandt, a music teacher and IT manager.
The virtualisation project has taken four years to complete due to the school's budget constraints, but now allows backups of a terabyte of data in half an hour, compared to the nine hours it used to take.
Brandt feels that the results have been worth the arduous road. "I have never regretted the decisions, and I would strongly urge my colleagues at other schools to consider virtualising," he says. "It has made an enormous difference and had a tremendous impact on every aspect of the school and its IT infrastructure and data."
The speed of backup, in particular, has had a huge impact, says Brandt. "Tape backups were slow to make, and it took a long time to restore lost data."
After implementing Veeam Backup and Replication, "at first I couldn't believe how fast it was," he says. "Backing up used to take nine hours - now it's less than half an hour for a terabyte of data. That means I can back up every night - or more often if I want to, because the backup process doesn't interfere with staff or student work."
Brandt receives an e-mail after backup, letting him know that it was successful. "That alone has saved me a lot of time," he says. "Before, I had to physically find the drive and double-check the time stamps to make sure a backup had run. Now I just check each morning to see what servers were backed up ... All our critical data, such as student records, is safe."
The recovery process has also been streamlined. "In the old days, if a file was lost, I would have been able to recover it eventually, but it would have taken time. Now, I can go back to the backup that occurred immediately before the data was deleted and recover the file in five minutes. I can essentially go back to any point in time; that's just brilliant."
The limited disk storage space is now being maximised, adds Brandt. "We used to back up only data, but now we can back up an entire virtual machine. We essentially have more data and restore points stored in the same amount of space."
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