State-of-the-art Academy, Kennet School in Berkshire, has deployed a pair of KEMP LoadMaster 2200 server load balancing appliances across its new Microsoft Exchange 2010 messaging environment to optimise the performance and resilience of its email and virtual learning environment. Designated as an Outstanding Academy in 2011 and the most over-subscribed school in West Berkshire, Kennet School has over 1,800 pupils and 300 staff.
Since moving to Academy status, the school wanted to migrate away from a legacy local authority email system that could be cumbersome and slow to provide a new in-house Microsoft Exchange 2010 platform. With the architecture changes in MS Exchange 2010, Kennet School realised that a load balancing solution would be required to get the best out of the system and deliver failover redundancy to ensure users continued to receive Exchange services even in the event of server failure.
KEMP Centre partner, System Professional, helped the school's IT team to migrate to the new environment and ensure high availability by installing the KEMP LoadMaster 2200 devices, certified by Microsoft for use with Exchange 2010.
Features such as Global Address Lists (GALs), Calendaring, Password Syncing and Delegated Access have improved communications and efficiency and the school's IT team plans to introduce more new Exchange applications for staff, confident that the KEMP load balancers will continue to provide high performance, site resilience and redundancy. In addition, Kennet School's interactive virtual learning environment - FROG - is now fully integrated with Exchange 2010 for use by all pupils.
“The KEMP load balancers were chosen for their ease of management, competitive pricing and overall product functionality," said Dan Haines, Network Engineer at Kennet School. “System Professional provided a valuable expert knowledge of Microsoft Exchange 2010 and the installation and setup was completed over a weekend ready for staff and pupils on the Monday morning.”
“As schools increasingly rely on sophisticated IT environments both for teaching and communications between staff, pupils and parents, they simply can’t afford to have poor performance or down-time,” said Leigh Bradford, sales manager at KEMP Technologies. “While traditional load balancing solutions have been too expensive for schools to consider, our KEMP LoadMaster range starts at just over £1,500.00 for a hardware appliance and combines high performance with affordability.”
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