Reseller Intercept has won a contract with three Cambridgeshire education institutions, after the trio decided to unite on a new virtualisation venture.

St Bede’s Inter-Church School, City of Ely Community College and Bottisham Village College decided to join forces to drive down costs.

The colleges and Intercept have opted for VMware’s vSphere4 cloud operating system, aiming to cut costs and reduce their carbon footprint by about 75 per cent.

Nigel Woods, technical director at Intercept, said: “Education establishments often spend long periods of time between technology updates, leaving them with legacy servers languishing at sub-optimal usage rates.

“We won the tender on the basis of delivering greater IT use and consequent savings through employing virtualisation techniques, as well as by demonstrating a measurable return on investment within the public sector.”

Ely and Bottisham both have existing traditional server infrastructures, whereas St Bede’s is in need of more server capacity. St Bede’s is being considered as a new project that requires the complete implementation of a new infrastructure.

David Knappett, ICT manager at St Bede's, said: “Intercept has allowed our school to maximise the use of the IT estate, while also enhancing our service offering to our many end users.

“Adopting virtualisation enables us to enjoy long-term flexibility benefits as well, by making any future changes or improvements much easier. We will also have the added bonus of not having to buy servers as often, and therefore not spend as much time maintaining them.”

Knappett explained that the technology helps ease the service bottleneck that was becoming damaging and time consuming.

He added: “Now the existing physical servers have been replaced with three new hosts, we can increase the number of servers, without increasing the space needed to house them. This will help achieve our desired green gains in power and cooling reduction while reducing costs.

“The aim is to speed up the entire network, make it more reliable and vastly improve the end user experience.”