Synapse360 has built a new virtual IT infrastructure for Trent & Dove Housing that provides both office-based and remote workers with fast and secure access to corporate systems.
The new EMC-based infrastructure replaces the housing provider’s legacy hardware and the project is largely in response to the growing demand for ‘always on’ access to corporate information and the government’s ‘digital by default’ agenda for universal credit and other government services.
Derek Eaton, IT manager, Trent & Dove Housing, said, “IT must play its part in our drive to demonstrate value for money. The starting point for us to achieve that is by having a simple, modern, scalable, high-performing platform that’s reliable, easy to manage and can easily accommodate new services.”
Synapse360 had originally installed Trent & Dove’s virtual infrastructure and disaster recovery capabilities using an EMC VSPEX virtualisation platform and Data Domain backup device.
When the housing provider wanted to improve desktop performance and enable its remote workers to use a variety of devices on the move, Synapse360 added additional hosts and flash storage to the VSPEX and upgraded the Citrix environment by adding a NetScaler appliance to improve load balancing and deliver a consistent user experience. At the same time, a second fibre channel was added.
Eaton said, “The performance improvement was dramatic; office applications opened within a second! We’ve had lots of positive feedback as all staff, whether office-based or remote, benefit from a consistent desktop performance.”
Synapse360 also migrated the workload from Trent & Dove’s remaining legacy hardware to the VSPEX platform and in doing so reduced the number of racks in its datacentre from three to one without compromising performance, at the same time as cutting power consumption by 20 per cent.
Eaton said, “We have reduced our operating costs with Synapse360, plus the new infrastructure can easily scale to accommodate new services, such as our forthcoming self-service portal. We have also improved our productivity by eliminating the frustrations of a slow performing system, while enabling our remote workers to do their jobs better on the ground.
“The efficiency of the IT team has improved too; IT staff no longer have to waste their time fire-fighting or making manual tape backups, they are now focused on improving our services.”
