University Consolidates Data Storage with Seagate 

The University of Buckingham located in Buckingham, England is the only independent university in the United Kingdom with a Royal Charter. As such, it celebrated its 40th anniversary in early 2023. With approximately 2,700 students enrolled and 1,600 living on campus, the university helped pioneer the two-year degree which greatly assists students in their academic pursuits by saving them time and money. 

As with most organizations around the world, the amount of data the University of Buckingham stores has been growing steadily for years. However, their storage infrastructure was spread between separate physical locations creating multiple islands—or data silos—that made the data difficult to maintain and use. The university’s intent was to quickly and securely consolidate their data into a durable, scalable, unified system. 

The University of Buckingham’s data storage infrastructure was previously comprised of multiple servers and additional separate storage devices. The IT staff sought to consolidate their data storage into a more flexible, unified system in order to better manage the growing amounts of student and staff data. 

Time was also a major factor for the school and its IT staff. As a major proponent of a two-year (rather than three-year) degree system, the university changed the number of its teaching terms from the traditional three, to four. This change in duration and philosophy, while it helps attending students attain their degrees at an accelerated pace, provides the University of Buckingham’s IT staff with very little downtime or extra time for new IT initiatives (e.g., solutions, evaluations, and/or replacements). 

With these criteria in mind, the university was hopeful it could implement a proven, reliable data storage solution that provided:  

• scalability for both capacity and performance 
• easy maintenance and administration 
• efficiency for both local and remote users 
• security and resiliency 

The University of Buckingham set out to consolidate their data storage within a limited timeframe due to their dedication to saving students time and costs. Seagate, along with IT solutions provider Virtual Effect and solution partners DataCore and Arcserve, aimed to provide the same level of commitment to the university. 

“We’re looking at expanding our storage area networks,” Smith said, “adding SSDs and faster drives, as well as the existing hard drives so we've got security. We’re going to give everything a speed boost by adding SSDs to it, which we can just do with the Seagate hardware, and DataCore will just pick it up and just work.”  

The university’s IT staff realized it needed to grow its data storage capacity without overspending. Working with Seagate, they realized that they had the ability to add more drives and increase speed within their budget. Most of all, they knew they had a partner they could trust and easily work with. 

Working with IT solutions provider Virtual Effect of Peterborough, England, the University of Buckingham selected Seagate’s Exos X 2U24 data storage array, populated with Exos hard drives. This solution provides consistency in brand and support that few other storage manufacturers can provide. Joining Seagate in Virtual Effect’s setup for the university are integrated solutions from DataCore and Arcserve. 

The University has now standardized its entire storage architecture on Seagate’s hardware platform as they believe Seagate is one of the most recognizable names in data storage. 

“Our storage area networks are completely manufactured by Seagate,” said Martyn Smith, head of IT at the University of Buckingham, “so the drives and the arrays are all Seagate products. Again, that gives us more reliability.” 

Smith and the university’s IT staff also appreciated the ability to add SSDs into the Exos data storage array, providing the ability to add performance and capacity in the future.