Balesio AG, provider of native file optimisation solutions for unstructured data, has helped Bartholomew School in Oxford, UK, to make its storage work smarter and harder by significantly shrinking the size of its unstructured data.
A mixed comprehensive school with an excellent academic record, Bartholomew School has been awarded an Ofsted Outstanding School status, a High Performing Specialist School and a Specialist Technology College status by the UK government. With balesio’s FILEminimizer Server software the school has reduced the overall amount of data stored on expensive primary storage by nearly 100GB, also achieving a reduction in backup storage as well as data recovery and restore times as a result.
According to government legislation, schools must retain students’ work for two years after they have left; with approximately 1,100 students aged 11–18 and 250 staff generating a total average of around 1.5TB of data, the available storage on the Bartholomew School’s file servers was running close to maximum capacity and the IT department was finding that it backups took too long. However the cut backs in education budgets meant that the cost of additional storage was not viable.
The school decided to combat the growing data volume by tackling the cause rather than the symptoms and deployed balesio’s Native Format Optimization (NFO) solution FILEminimizer Server. The software’s capability to effectively reduce the size of unstructured Microsoft Office, image and PDF files natively by 50-90% from one central installation was instrumental to the school’s successful fight against file bloat and high unstructured data growth.
Jason Caul, Network Manager at Bartholomew School, comments: “I was looking at reducing the overall amount of storage and the duration of backups which, had we not utilised FILEminimizer, could and probably would have undermined user access to the network and their data.” He adds, “Having searched around and tested many different products, I selected FILEminimizer because of its performance, cost, and functionality."
Shortly after balesio’s technology was deployed, the school saw a reduction in its primary storage requirements. For Caul the advantages were clear: “FILEminimizer Server is so simple to install and use, I believe that it should be considered an essential piece of software for all network managers to keep in their arsenal.”
Christoph Schmid, Chief Operating Officer at balesio, added, “A growing number of educational institutions are learning about the benefits offered by our innovative NFO technology. Network managers across the public sector now realise that there is an easy, quick and cost-effective way to make their storage work smarter and that is by eliminating unnecessary ‘bloat’ in unstructured data.”
Caul concludes, “The best thing about balesio’s FILEminimizer Server software is that it can handle all our main file types so it is all we need to tackle data growth. I would recommend this software to anyone who needs to contain large amounts of storage.”