Case Studies
Highgate School Boosts Bandwidth and Cuts Cost with hSo
- School’s increasing usage drives need for expansion
- Price and reliability are key
- hSo delivers 50% cost reduction with a threefold increase in bandwidth
About Highgate School
Highgate School is a prestigious, independent co‐educational day school for around 1,400 pupils aged 3‐18 years old; it was established in 1565 by a Royal Charter of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the First. The school’s network is now critical to its education services.
Highgate School has several ICT suites where some lessons are delivered and each classroom has a computer with an interactive white board. All lessons are planned and executed using these tools making it difficult to teach without them and meaning the system must always be available. The school has a skilled IT department in‐house, with its own Network Operations Centre (NOC) and data centre.
The Challenge
The key challenge for the school was to replace its Internet access circuit as it lacked the scalability to meet the growing needs of the teachers. Their original circuit was installed in 2007, and initially seemed to serve the school perfectly. However, as teachers increasingly used IT to supplement their lessons, the circuit had insufficient capacity to meet their needs.
“The IT department needed to find an upgrade for the circuit,” says Highgate School IT Services Manager Lee Reindorf, “it was running flat out at a time when we really needed more from the system.”
Due to their growth over recent years, the team had moved from a comms room to a purpose-built data centre—a virtualised server environment with its own NOC. The move made the need for a new circuit imperative.
Highgate School’s three key criteria for the new circuit supplier were:
- Price—as an education provider on a limited budget, it needed a solution offering value for money
- Reliability—a credible company with a strong, trusted reputation
- Support—a company with the technical expertise, resources and systems to support the school, both during implementation and going forward
Reindorf explained:“We use this system every day to help educate our pupils, so finding the right solution was crucial. We needed a supplier that could be trusted not only to implement the best circuit for us, but to continue to provide high levels of support as and when we need it going forward.”
Why hSo?
Highgate School spoke to a number of different suppliers, for a quotation. With good value, reliability and a strong support offering high on the agenda, hSo emerged as the clear winner.
hSo was chosen because it was able to meet all of the school’s requirements:
- hSo’s price represented excellent value for money
- Seeing high-profile companies including a FTSE 100 company in hSo’s customer base gave Highgate School a high level of reassurance in hSo’s capability
- Importantly, hSo was extremely responsive, and it was clear they had the technical ability to deliver the support the school needed
Reindorf said: “We knew exactly what we were looking for and hSo seemed to fit the brief. Being able to see how many other reputable organisations already use hSo really boosted our confidence in their ability to deliver on their promise.”
The Solution
hSo’s fully-managed solution delivered:
- Scalability: Internet access over a 100Mbit/s fibre circuit to the hSo core network. The circuit provides the future ability to more than triple their bandwidth if required—perfect for the school’s increasing usage
- Resilience:
- a backup circuit provides the seamless failover of IP addresses and connectivity at anytime, day or night
- different carriers for each circuit using diverse technologies (fibre and copper) boost its resilience
- Highgate School’s domain and DNS records are registered with hSo. If the email servers ever go down, hSo can capture the school’s emails and store them for up to 10 days for future retrieval
hSo also provides Highgate with a circuit that terminates in the school’s own data centre.
The Benefits
hSo’s solution gives the school:
- Massive cost savings—the new package cost nearly 50% less—with a threefold increase in bandwidth
- Scalability that can deliver solutions to meet the school’s growing reliance on its IT system. Reindorf enthused:“If we find out at some point that we’re maxing out, it will be a simple phone call to hSo and we can crank it up”
- Reliable support—the 24/7 NOC provides the school with instant access to expert engineers at any time.
hSo’s flexible solution not only meets the school’s immediate needs, but continues to provide the support required by Highgate’s growing system.
According to Reindorf, a key factor in meeting the brief was hSo’s responsiveness:“hSo is a lot more client-focused than most suppliers. With hSo, we have a dedicated Account Manager who is on hand at all times.”
“We are very happy with hSo’s services. All engineers have been consistently good. The price was also impressive—ultimately we are getting more for less!”
– Lee Reindorf, IT Services Manager, Highgate School
