Thirteen Housing Group has completed the installation of a new storage and disaster recovery infrastructure from Synapse360, based on Dell EMC and Zerto software and hardware.
Hassan Bahrani, senior network & infrastructure manager, Thirteen Group, said, “When our core storage infrastructure started to show its age, with diminishing performance and increasing maintenance costs, it was time for us to look at refreshing our storage area network. After being introduced by Dell, Synapse360’s bid won the tender to replace our core infrastructure.
“The deployment went very smoothly and the performance improvements from our new Dell EMC Unity All-Flash storage area network are seriously impressive. With Unity, we’ve decreased our rack-space usage by 70 per cent which in turn has reduced our aircon costs by at least £4,000 per year. The performance is fantastic – our IT team is really impressed by the system’s response times and servers that start up almost instantaneously.”
Thirteen then looked at its disaster recovery facilities after a number of mergers meant that the housing provider’s previous DR facilities would either need to be rehoused or a cloud-based alternative found.
Bahrani said, “Within a week, Synapse360 produced a proposal that described the proposed DR solution in detail. Its cloud-based solution uses continuous data protection technology from Zerto, with the replication target being Synapse360’s own ISO27001-accredited data centre, protecting 170 virtual machines.
“Now we don’t have the expense of another site to house our DR operations or even the capital cost of buying the infrastructure; these overheads are now absorbed by Synapse360 and we just pay a monthly fee. The replication is fast and working really well, plus Synapse360 is creating a dedicated DR ‘runbook’ so we can look forward to near-instantaneous recovery.”
