Bernica has completed its migration to a new Dell EMC ‘hyper-converged’ infrastructure, with the deployment carried out by Synapse360.
Adam Watson, network and infrastructure manager, Bernicia Housing, said, “Following sustained growth, our old Nimble infrastructure was creaking at the seams. Performance was erratic, we didn’t have the IOPs we needed, we were running out of storage and connectivity was slow.
“While we knew we had to replace the infrastructure, we didn’t want to replace like-for-like. Not only did we want a next-generation solution that would provide the performance and scalability we needed, we also wanted a solution that would be very simple to manage. Afterall, our role is to help the business be more effective, not to be a slave to our infrastructure.”
Bernicia decided that a hyper-converged solution would best address their requirements and chose Dell EMC’s VxRail, with Dell EMC’s platinum partner Synapse360 selected for actual deployment and migration.
Watson said, “There was a good momentum about the Synapse360 team’s approach, and the deployment and migration went perfectly with no downtime. The Synapse360 engineers also helped us to migrate our VMWare VDI environment to the platform even though that wasn’t part of the project.
“VxRail ticked all the boxes for us. There’s a crazy amount of IOPs available, it’s highly scalable and because of the 10Gb switches, our comms are fast too. Most importantly, many of our routine management tasks have been automated and can be performed with just one click. That’s given us a lot of time back, so much so that we’ve been able to accelerate our deployment of an important new housing management system.”
Bernica reported that the new platform is delivering noticeable results, with no more performance spikes that previously affected everybody’s desktop because the all-flash storage delivers consistently high performance while the new Dell EMC data protection software offers almost instantaneous recoverability.
Watson said, “It’s fabulous! There really are no negatives and it’s a doddle to manage. Synapse360 know hyper-converged technology inside out and our experience of working with their team has been excellent – they are now a preferred supplier and a trusted partner.”
