First there was converged infrastructure. Then came hyper-converged infrastructure. So, how do you decide which approach is right for you? Download our eBook to find out!

At Q Associates, we wanted to see how organisations were finding the transition to the cloud – be it public, private or hybrid. So, we commissioned some research to find out…Download our E-Book to see what we found out!

You can’t have failed to hear all the noise about the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which comes into force on May 25, 2018.

The most important change to data privacy regulation in 20 years, a lot of people are still trying to understand what GDPR means for their business. IT Leaders in particular…

Q Associates provides award winning IT Transformation into Higher Education. We are a UCISA member and have been awarded a place on the SSSNA framework.

Our focus is on innovation and leveraging the best services and technologies, including:

• Expert IT consultation and advisory services
• Converged, hyper-converged and cloud-based solutions
• Data protection, compliance and information security

Our aim is to support all our clients with independent advice and provide them with the knowledge, guidance and capabilities to underpin their strategic IT decision-making.

Q Associates offer a range of smart financial solutions to help our customers maximise their efficiency, profitability and growth. We can help with overcoming budgetary barriers to close larger projects that yield better returns. Our team of experienced professionals are here to guide, with a wealth of channel expertise they can help identify areas which need addressing and recommend the most appropriate course of action.

Want to know about Q Associates? Download our infographic to learn more.

Q help with building a Smart Storage Strategy at the University of Bedfordshire

Industry:

Education

The Challenge:

University of Bedfordshire’s storage estate was approaching end of life

The Solution:

High-performance flash storage

Benefits:

• Single system management
• Improved efficiency
• Improved DR resilience
• High performance

Q helps FT Rewrites its Enterprise Data Storage Strategy

Industry:

Media

The Challenge:

The Financial Times needed to initiate a new storage environment with resilience and scalability to handle with rapidly growing workloads

The Solution:

• NetApp FAS8040 high availability system
• Q NetApp Active Support

Benefits:

• Cloud Integration
• High performance
• Easy to scale
• 24/7 Support

Q Associates helps Avon implement a robust data repository platform, delivering improved performance, scalability and near-instant backup and recovery – plus the agility to seamlessly extend to the cloud.

Industry:

Cosmetics and beauty products

The Challenge:

Avon needed to consolidate IT infrastructures and business services across EMEA to a unified UK datacentre.

The Solution:

NetApp/Cisco Flexpod for VMware
Q Active Support

Benefits:

• Easy to manage
• Cost effective
• High performance
• Easy to scale

Exeter College ensures seamless student and staff services with scalable Lenovo infrastructure

Overview:

With operations growing and student numbers continuing to rise, Exeter College’s existing IT infrastructure couldn’t keep up. The college migrated its mission-critical applications on virtual servers to Lenovo Flex System – a flexible, easily-scalable platform powered by Intel® Xeon® that delivers high levels of performance – ensuring that student services run uninterrupted even as demand rises.

The Solution:

Hardware:

• Lenovo Flex System Enterprise
• Chassis
• Lenovo Flex System x240 M5 compute nodes with Intel® Xeon® E5 processor family
• Lenovo Flex System FC5022 16Gb
• SAN Scalable Switches
• Storwize V7000

Clients

• Lenovo ThinkCentre M70e
• Lenovo ThinkCentre M71e
• Lenovo ThinkCentre M72e
• Lenovo ThinkCentre M73z

Software

VMware vSphere 6

The UK’s National Synchrotron Facility, Diamond Light Source, Turns to Netapp Flash Storage for a High-Speed Data Buffer

Industry:

Scientific research and education

The Challenge

Given the nature of its work, computing at Diamond is by necessity extremely processor and storage intensive in order to analyze and store data from the beamlines. To achieve the required computing capacity, Diamond provides a general-purpose compute cluster of approximately 1,900 compute cores and 250,000 GPU cores, which is also used for automated fast data processing on beamlines.

The amounts of data generated from beamline research are so enormous that Diamond stores the data on tape systems because it’s not cost-effective to keep the data on disks forever, utilizing the 2PB of high-performance storage most efficiently. Diamond aims to keep data on disk for approximately six months from time of collection. That said, the organization has a data dispenser that permits clients to download their data onto disks and take it back to their home institution.

Each beamline at Diamond is optimized for a specific technique. However, the synchrotron wanted to implement a high-speed data buffer for data coming off two beamlines so it could be stored locally before being transferred to the central high-performance file system.

The Solution:

NetApp E540 Flash Array

Benefits:

• High performance
• Easy to scale
• Easy to manage
• Cost effective