Birmingham Technology College Goes Green

Bristnall Hall Technology College (previously Bristnall Hall School) Is a Secondary School with 1000 students and 150 staff located in the heart of Birmingham West Midlands, England. With Collaborative VI form and Technology Status for Design Technology and Maths and Science, it has been awarded "Outstanding" status, only a year after the appointment of Mr Stephen Venross as Head Teacher.

The Ofsted Inspection letter which was sent out to students included;

“We are impressed by your skills in ICT and the way that your teachers use ICT to make lessons more enjoyable”. Currently the College has 600 desktops and 200 laptops, all able to access the centrally held information, secure and protected.

This certainly emphasises the schools mission statement of "Bringing Technology into our Technology College"

An excellent example of a project to help raise the awareness of bringing technology into the college the pupils have set up an Advertising Agency to promote Design and Technology for the college -You can find more details here http://www.bhtc.sandwell.sch.uk/

Data Growth
As you can imagine the growth of the data has been continuous andPhillip Wakeman ICT & Network Support Manager decided it was about time to consolidate and manage the data growth as nightly backups were increasing and with data estimated to grow by 3GB per term this was only going to get worse.

Bristnall Hall Technology College are now able to discover, manage and ultimately reduce the amount of data stored across their primary storage. By using the File Archiving technology, smart stubbing and archive data chunking, it has been possible to reduce the total amount of data that is stored and needs to be backed up by 72%.

Phillip Wakeman reports that “Using File Archiver has allowed me to optimize my storage across the network, reducing the size of the nightly backups and overall storage space used across my file servers. I am saving money not needing additional backup media and equipment"

Aspects of File Archiver examined during decision process
- Ability staff to access files from the archive transparently
-Reduction total data backup on a nightly basis
-Level of reporting
-Search functionality
-Storage Medium agnostic
-Two way movement of stored files
-Automated operation
- Multiple array of archives.

Benefits of using File Archiver-
Free up expensive disk space by capacity optimization
Fully supports Virtual servers
Smart stubs allow applications with linked data to be archived
De duplicates expensive primary storage
Deferral of expensive hardware
Automates a number of IT management tasks
Green software technology,
Reduces energy consumption costs
Archives critical data


James Evans who works at the College as the IT & Network Support Technician / Virtual Learning Platform Developer says "Policies are now set, example you can select for the student coursework to be archived and encrypted securely in case it needs to be retrieved. We are also now compliant with freedom of Information Act requests, if say someone from an outside third party requests any data. We are also saving our school money on energy consumption costs and this is a software with no need to purchase any additional hardware which is always a bonus!"