Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 04 | Page 64

CASE STUDY HAVING THE ABILITY TO SIMPLY SCALE AS AND WHEN NEEDED IS A GREAT RESOURCE. WE CAN’T BUDGET FOR UNKNOWN GROWTH AND CAPACITY AND IT’S REASSURING TO KNOW SCALE COMPUTING WILL BE ABLE TO MEET OUR FUTURE REQUIREMENTS. T he Roman Catholic Diocese of Westminster is one of the smallest dioceses in England and Wales in geographical area, but the largest in terms of Catholic population and priests. The diocesan boundaries include the London boroughs north of the Thames, between the River Lea to the east, the Borough of Hillingdon to the east and including the county of Hertfordshire to the north. With over 200 parishes and 200 schools, hundreds of clergy members and numerous societies and departments, the Diocese runs as a company and has many of the same requirements as a business. Working with Paralogic to solve IT challenges Many of the departments and parishes have similar IT needs to business branch offices 64 INTELLIGENTCIO and the Diocese turned to its long-term ICT partner Paralogic, to help find a solution that could support day-to-day operations. The Diocese wanted to take advantage of the latest technology that would enable the parishes and multiple departments to engage with each other and embrace new applications. Rod de Silva, ICT Manager for the Diocese of Westminster, said: “We’ve worked with Paralogic as our main ICT partner for a number of years. The close working relationship we enjoy means the team understand how we try to organise our time. We consulted them on the need for upgrades and they came back to us with a proposal that was right for us.” Previously, the Diocese had four physical servers hosting virtual machines and a local SAN device. “We needed to replace our IT system as it was reaching its end of life and we saw this as an opportunity to upgrade. Like many organisations, the technology team has finite resources. We try and organise our time so that 50% is spent on support issues and 50% on special projects and strategic matters. It was important for us to have a server infrastructure that was resilient and as easy to use as possible,” noted de Silva. Adam Plant, Director at Paralogic, commented: “The Diocese has similar requirements to any other organisation and being able to implement an IT solution that could support the multiple departments was critical. Scale Computing’s hyperconverged appliance seemed like a natural fit and we worked with them throughout the process from the initial purchasing, through to the implementation and support, to ensure this was a smooth process.” Turning to hyperconvergence It was essential that Westminster could provide server access across the Diocese and www.intelligentcio.com