Advance TAFE Chooses
Logicalis For Infrastructure Modernisation Hat-trick.
Delivers budget infrastructure upgrade, virtualised
server farm and SAN storage for business critical
applications
Sydney, November
29, 2011 – AdvanceTAFE, formerly East Gippsland Institute
of TAFE, has completed a significant modernisation to its IT
infrastructure in support of a state-wide student administration
system upgrade and organisational re-brand.
Following a competitive tender, Logicalis designed and
implemented a scalable storage and server virtualisation solution
that provided the technical foundation for concurrent
infrastructure-demanding projects at Advance TAFE, while minimising
disruption and maximise the TAFE’s budget.
Advance TAFE undertook this important infrastructure project in
order to meet a significant infrastructure deadline associated with
a Victorian TAFE consortium implementation of a new student
management system. Secondly, its re-branding exercise required
Advance TAFE to concurrently create a new suite of core Domain
services, including Active Directory and Exchange.
Advance TAFE had sought initially to upgrade its storage
requirements independent of server virtualisation, however
Logicalis identified a model that enabled it to combine both
activities as a single project, within Advance TAFE’s budget.
Using EMC technology, Logicalis implemented a centralised SAN
storage platform that allows for simplified future expansion, with
an initial storage requirement of 8TB. It then provided an
effective and highly available virtualisation platform to
consolidate existing server requirements, supporting many institute
applications and services. The Logicalis virtualised solution was
quickly capitalised on and expanded, reducing the need for 23
physical servers to seven physical hosts for the student management
system upgrade alone, and provided a genuinely agile technology
environment.
Advance TAFE completed the project ahead of budget with no
disruption to its 14,000 annual students and 350 staff. Logicalis
helped the TAFE achieve efficiencies via service level agreement
rationalisation, training in physical to virtual machine migration
sessions and effective use of existing technology. As part of this,
Logicalis enabled the TAFE to utilise two redundant physical
servers to host the virtual server farm to make use of existing
investments.
“Our concurrent project requirements created a perfect storm of
IT infrastructure demands and Logicalis found a solution that
allowed us to meet these requirements by upgrading our sever and
storage infrastructure platform, much more quickly than we had
imagined possible” said Nick Fordham, Manager ITS, Projects &
Systems, Advance TAFE. “Logicalis responded with a flexible
solution that avoided any disruption to the business, and resolved
many of the challenges that keep the IT team awake at night.”
“Our teams are skilled at designing solutions that genuinely help
clients resolve complex technology problems,” said Oliver
Descoeudres, Marketing Director at Logicalis. “It’s great to be
part of a solution that a client doesn’t expect to be solved,
especially when they have Government and Consortium deadlines to
adhere to, while maintaining business as normal operations.”
About Advance TAFE
Advance TAFE is the vocational and tertiary education hub of
south-eastern Victoria, with two main campuses, plus specialist
centres and outreach centres located across the Wellington Shire
and East Gippsland Shire regions.
Our main campuses at Bairnsdale and Sale have a wide range of
higher education and vocational facilities, including commercial
kitchens, trades centres and university programs, which combine
on-campus classes with the latest in online and video-conferencing
technology.
Our nationally renowned specialist education centres offer the
kinds of facilities that other education providers dream about.
Forestec is our specialist environmental, forestry and
furniture design centre and is located in the incredible Gippsland
bush, in one of the most diverse temperate forest ecosystems in the
world. Our
Seamec Maritime Education centre on the waterfront at Lakes
Entrance boasts a deep-water berth, aquaculture facilities and
well-equipped laboratories, making it a hub for marine and maritime
industry training that draws participants from all over Australia.
Farmtec Education Centre is a working farm on the outskirts of
Sale offering horticulture, agriculture and equine studies,
including popular courses in organics. Farmtec also allows students
to learn how to operate the latest automated irrigation
systems.
From the first
beginnings of vocational and adult education more than 100
years ago at the Bairnsdale School of Mines and the Sale and
Bairnsdale Technical Schools, through to the creation of the East
Gippsland Institute of TAFE in 1986, and finally Advance TAFE in
2011, our mission has remained the same.
We believe that every individual and enterprise in the community
has a right to educational opportunity at a time and in a place and
of a form appropriate to their expectations, needs and
capabilities. To date, we are the only Victorian TAFE Institute to
be recognised as an outstanding RTO, awarded ‘Gold’ status for
training excellence under the Australian Quality Framework
Excellence Criteria. We were awarded Victorian Large Training
Provider of the Year in 2006 and we continually rank among the
highest in the state for student, client and staff
satisfaction.
More information can be found at: http://www.advancetafe.edu.au
About Logicalis
Logicalis is an international provider of integrated information
and communications technology (ICT) solutions and services founded
on a superior breadth of knowledge and expertise in communications
& collaboration; data centre; and professional and managed
services.
Logicalis Group employs over 1,900 people worldwide, including
highly trained service specialists who design, specify, deploy and
manage complex ICT infrastructures to meet the needs of over 5,000
corporate and public sector customers. To achieve this, Logicalis
maintains strong partnerships with technology leaders such as
Cisco, HP, IBM and Microsoft.
The Logicalis Group has annualised revenues in excess of $1
billion, from operations in the UK, US, Germany, South America and
Asia Pacific, and is fast establishing itself as one of the leading
IT and Communications service providers, specialising in the areas
of advanced technologies and services.
The Logicalis Group is a division of Datatec Limited, a $3.7
billion revenue business listed on the Johannesburg and London AIM
Stock Exchanges. For more information, visit www.logicalis.com.
For further information, please contact:
Jo Balfour
Progressiva
Tel: 0405 542 018 Email: jobalfour@progressiva.com.au