Abbot’s Hill School recently celebrated its centenary, having been founded on its present 70-acre site by two of the pioneering Baird sisters. This independent day school has pupil-led ‘clans’ that compete against each other, offering children an opportunity to take responsibility from an early age. Young women are actively encouraged to develop proficiency in management, organisation and leadership skills, as embodied by 16-year old Abbot’s Hill pupil Zara Brownless, the winner of 2011’s BBC Junior Apprentice competition under the critical eyes of Lord Sugar.

The Abbot’s Hill approach is to give personalised support, ensuring that everyone reaches their full potential, and this way of working was uppermost in the mind of the school’s ICT network manager, Marco Volpi, when he established a relationship with Equity Networks in 2013.

Marco explains why he chose Equity, “I realised that Abbot’s Hill needed to upgrade its server infrastructure, in order to improve resilience and deliver a better end-user experience.”

“In summer 2013, after obtaining competitive tenders from a number of IT suppliers, I selected Equity because its proposal was technically sound, its prices were competitive and it could deliver within timescale. Additionally, I found that its staff were highly motivated and the company came with a good overall reputation.”

Equity engineers installed a new fibre cluster, consisting of three HP servers plus a fibre channel Storage Area Network (SAN), running Microsoft’s Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. This new virtual server environment greatly improved the efficiency of school computing resources whilst optimising server availability. We not only provided full support during and after the commissioning period, but also handled the migration of existing servers and services.

The school is delighted with the results and Marco says, “Equity has met all of our expectations – in fact, they have exceeded our expectations and the whole project has been hassle-free. I find it particularly reassuring that they are always so quick to reply to any of my requests.”