The Customer
University College Falmouth is a vibrant and forward-thinking specialist arts college that is a key player in the national and international creative scene. It has an international reputation for excellence in Art, Design, Media, Performance and Writing and nurtures original thinking, supported by a highly talented and professional body of staff.
Falmouth's Schools of Art and Design and Media and Performance offer some of the most innovative, entrepreneurial, collaborative and transformative learning experiences available in a specialist college of art. Falmouth is a member of both the Ukadia group of specialist arts and design institutions from across the UK's higher and further education sectors and the Cornwall Skillset Media Academy network, a UK-wide group of institutions identified as centres of excellence in creative media education and training. University College Falmouth merged with Dartington College in 2008, heralding an exciting new era for arts education in the South West and paving the way for the development of a new specialist Arts University in Cornwall that is expected to be in place by 2012.
The Solution
The college's Learning Technology department was operating on a low-end, minimal setup, with support coming from a single source within the department itself. They had two servers running Ubuntu: one web server and one database server. There was no monitoring or support for this setup outside of core college hours.
As University College Falmouth moved towards expanding its offering through the development of online distance and blended learning courses, as well as a wider integration with campus-based courses, it was important to create a service which was more resilient, scalable and reliable. In addition, the college in-house IT team had undertaken a large scale virtualization project and the Learning Technology department was keen to take advantage of the hardware resilience flowing from this work.
In addition, the college had very few formal Linux skills within the Learning Technology department, with the college in-house IT team unable to support them. So it was vital that they found a long term solution.
The Benefits
Commenting on the selection of LinuxIT and the project itself, Ben Bull, Senior Learning Technologist, said:
"LinuxIT was by far the most helpful company we approached; offering a complete package of design, implementation and support. Since adopting LinuxIT Monitored Support Service, we've experienced much less downtime due to its constant monitoring and, personally, I can sleep better knowing that someone is keeping an eye on our operations 24/7. I can't praise the service we receive enough, it really is world class. From the very start of the project, right the way through to ongoing support, I have found LinuxIT to be professional, friendly and extremely knowledgeable. We will definitely continue to use LinuxIT in the future for all our Linux support."
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