Overview
Manor Lodge School is an independent primary school for children aged 4 to 11 in Hertfordshire, UK. Located on a beautiful site in open countryside, the school is surrounded by fields, woodland, and wildlife. Teaching and learning outdoors are embedded in its curriculum. Rain or shine, Manor Lodge students spend time every week learning how to build shelters, light campfires, cook food, engage with local flora and fauna, and practice traditional crafts such as blacksmithing and thatching, alongside a rigorous and modern academic curriculum.
Supernova Award Category
Data to Decisions
The Problem
The Manor Lodge’s unique curriculum values hands-on teaching with technology, and students learn to use a variety of devices and operating systems, both in the classroom and across the school’s grounds. Staff and students need to be able to access digital teaching materials and resources instantly from anywhere on-site. Aging servers and storage systems brought reliability issues, causing bi-weekly outages that disrupted lessons for more than one hour at a time, and impacted teachers, students, and administrators alike.
The Solution
The Manor Lodge started by taking a full inventory of the existing infrastructure to build a strong business case for investing in new systems. Then, the Manor Lodge ran a competitive tender process, shortlisted three vendors, and selected the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) array to host the new environment, which provides a 100% data availability guarantee and vast capacity for storing any type of data, from teaching materials to images and videos of students’ work. With cooperation from Qual and TD SYNNEX, Manor Lodge planned and executed a rapid, safe migration from its legacy infrastructure to the new solution.
The results
The new infrastructure eliminated the hardware faults that plagued the Manor Lodge IT team and the teachers and students. Since implementing Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) array, the school has only had one outage due to a local power outage. Manor Lodge’s team can focus on implementing tech-forward learning initiatives on a system that they can trust, knowing that their systems and data are secure.
Metrics
Providing 100% data availability guarantee and vast capacity for storing any type of data, from teaching materials to images and videos of students’ work.
The Technology
The Manor Lodge implemented the Hitachi Vantara VSP array to replace an unreliable system.
Disruptive Factor
Education should be at the forefront of technological innovation, but it’s a vertical that's hindered by legacy systems that need updating. The Manor Lodge’s partnership with Hitachi Vantara is pushing forward what a technology-first education can achieve. By using Hitachi Vantara’s tech, students can learn to use the technology needed to prepare them for an age of innovation when they move to the next stage of their education.
Shining Moment
The Manor Lodge’s commitment to empowering the next generation of innovators is singular. Teaching real skills and opening learning to unique skills is key to developing leaders. As the Manor Lodge looks for additional opportunities and areas for improvement, it can do so with confidence in Hitachi Vantara’s solutions.