Filton College Goes Green With Virtualisation

Filton College, Bristol, has found a green solution for managing its technology.

With help from Devon-based Business Computing and Network Services Ltd (BCNS) the college has rolled out a virtualisation programme taking physical servers and making them ‘virtual’.

Virtualisation solutions simplify IT so organisations can leverage their storage, network, and computing resources to control costs and respond faster.

Network manager Derrick Denley, who heads a team of six, explains: “Our virtualisation solution allows multiple virtual machines to run in isolation, side-by-side on the same physical machine, making ten servers into one.”

One of the fastest growing colleges in the South West, Filton provides further education for more than 2000 14-19 year olds on full time courses and more than 10,000 adult part-time learners.

A new vocational campus specialises in sports, visual and performing arts.

Derrick chose BCNS because he was well aware of their reputation and expertise.

“We have an annual contract with them for our Microsoft and VMware based system. It includes two on-site support days as well and over the years they have helped with our high level networking issues such as routers and spam filters for emails.

“BCNS are currently working with us on several big projects including the migration of our email to an Exchange server, routing between sites and expanding our networking system which is happening over the next academic year.

All these improvements help us to speed things up, manage costs, benefit our housekeeping and keep up to date.

“BCNS are absolutely brilliant,” he adds “They know what they are talking about and I wouldn’t go anywhere else.”