Their journey towards this optimal virtualised state has been long and arduous, with the schools' network manager, Simon Thompson, detailing the course: " We started off using FalconStor 's appliance creating a NetWare cluster on VMware, but as we needed more capacity, the pricing model was becoming prohibitive, so we moved toward StarWind Software 's Virtual SAN solution to provide an alternate software-defined storage platform. For two years the solution served us well, right up until the emergence of a compulsory upgrade. " At this point, the virtual journey faltered and took on an altogether more challenging and consuming route for Simon and his team, as matters started to deteriorate behind the scenes at the 350 year old school. The upgrade itself should have been easy, but instead took five hours before grinding to a halt. Simon discovered that the same fault happened every time the system was re-started, accompanied by data corruption.