Downing College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college was founded in 1800 through a bequest made by Sir George Downing. The College is home to a lively and diverse scholarly community, including about 420 undergraduates, 220 graduates and 54 fellows, supported by over 130 staff. It has a unique and magnificent setting amid 20 acres of lawns and trees, yet is in the very centre of Cambridge. The buildings, which are predominantly neo-classical in style, convey a sense of elegance and spaciousness.

Downing College had a requirement to build more resilience into their entire server platform. Areas of the environment were protected with technology like clustering but this was complex, didn’t cover the whole estate and therefore simply wasn’t enough. With certain growth in the number of applications requiring resilient uptimes, Rob Beardwell, IT Manager from Downing realised that simply adding to the existing physical server estate was not a sustainable option. “The main driver for investigating virtualisation was the ability to provide an environment that would serve our changing requirements” explained Rob. “We now have applications and services that need to be running 24/7. We can handle a little downtime but it needs to be at a time of our choosing. The side effect of being able to implement our upcoming new application requirements more sustainably and cost effectively was also a plus point. S3 tackled this challenge with a fresh approach that no other supplier had taken, advising us that they would be able to re-use existing hardware – saving us money and Carbon in the process. It might sound trite, but S3 sold us ideas whereas the other vendors we spoke to wanted to sell us boxes”.

Building on the above, Downing College is the only Oxbridge college to have Carbon Trust Status so replacing their aging server infrastructure with like for like just wasn’t an option from a green perspective and being able to re-use embodied carbon in existing investments made perfect sense

Having looked at virtualisation previously in the guise of Citrix XenServer, Ben Ford, Computer Officer at Downing College found that the management tools available with VMware especially the native vCenter product were far more sophisticated and compatible to their requirements. Additionally the licensing flexibility and cost effectiveness that the VMware Essentials Plus product offered set it apart.

Backup tools were also a big area of focus for Ben. The product that S3 and Downing College chose to back their environment was Veeam Backup and Replication. This tool came as part of the Veeam Essentials Bundle for VMware. With advanced features enabling 10x faster incremental backups, de-duplication of backup files and the ability to restore your entire environment and run virtual machines from backup files themselves it really made managing backups and as importantly restore testing a whole lot easier. The Veeam Essentials Bundle also includes other valuable components such as Veeam Monitor and Veeam Reporter, which enhance the monitoring capability the team has and with the Reporter product documentation and change tracking is taken care of.

Implementation, with the S3 Consulting team working alongside Ben and the rest of the Downing IT Department only took two weeks and the process ran incredibly smoothly. It all happened with minimal downtime to the production environment and very little impact to the end users. ”The advantage in using S3 is that a complex undertaking is condensed into a managed project with clear start and end dates”, said Rob, “We’re a small Department and it’s easy to get drawn off-project by support requirements. Working with S3 enabled us to get the project done without reducing response in other areas.”

Appendix

As part of the planning for the project S3 conducted a capacity planner exercise to examine the 17 servers that were present. All 17 of these are classified as in scope for migration to a virtual platform. The high level results of this analysis can be seen below;