• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
Housing Technology logo

Housing Technology

Housing | IT | Telecoms | Business | Ecology

  • Free Subscription
  • Search Archive
  • Home
  • Research
  • Magazine
  • Events
  • Recruitment
  • Blog
  • On Demand
  • Contact
Home / Magazine Articles / Trent & Dove goes virtual with Synapse360

Trent & Dove goes virtual with Synapse360

Synapse360 has completed the roll out of a new virtualised infrastructure for Trent and Dove Housing, based on EMC’s VSPEX reference architecture. The project began in November 2012, with the first phase completed in January 2013, with the infrastructure itself costing just under £100,000.

The EMC-based infrastructure replaces Trent and Dove’s ageing server estate which was beginning to suffer from numerous hardware failures, slow performance from its Citrix desktops, and desktop and backup and disaster recovery processes that were taking too long.

John Imber, information systems manager, Trent & Dove Housing, said, “Some of our servers were up to seven years old and although we had partially virtualised our environment, we were still spending too much time maintaining the infrastructure and too little time helping the business address new challenges.

“We needed a high degree of reliability and performance, we wanted to reduce disaster recovery times from days to hours, we wanted something easy to manage and that could scale with us for five years without further significant investment, and it needed to offer great value for money. We were also constrained by the size of our server room.”

Synapse360 was chosen in 2012 to supply and implement Trent and Dove’s new infrastructure, with the housing provider reporting that Synapse360 was the only supplier to propose a fully integrated solution.

VSPEX is an EMC reference architecture that combines server, network, virtualisation, storage and backup technologies in an infrastructure stack that enables businesses to transform their IT infrastructures quickly and simply. For Trent and Dove, Synapse360 specified Cisco UCS servers and networking, EMC VNX storage and Data Domain backup, and a VMware hypervisor.

Imber said, “One option was for us to build our own technology stack but there is always a risk that the components won’t work well together. With VSPEX, EMC has already done all the hard work by testing and pre-validating every component in the solution in order to significantly reduce our risk. We migrated 20 servers in the first week and that was pretty painless.

“VSPEX requires much less management than our old infrastructure. It is simple to provision virtual machines and the auto-tiering facility means that we can be sure that we are optimising our storage capacity without constant intervention.”

The integration of Data Domain has reduced Trent and Dove’s reliance on tape for backup and recovery. Backup times have been significantly reduced using Data Domain’s de-duplication technology and because it is fully integrated with the storage array, backup management is much simpler.

Imber said, “Resilience, performance, DR, scalability and management are all better with VSPEX, and we’ve slashed costs too.”

See More On:

  • Vendor: Synapse360
  • Topic: Infrastructure
  • Publication Date: 034 - July 2013
  • Type: News

Primary Sidebar

Most Recent Articles

  • Free cyber-defence tools from NCSC
  • Learning from history
  • Grand Union Housing gets connected with Aico HomeLink
  • The silences in the system: Predicting and preventing damp and mould
  • Looking back and to the future: Cyberthreats in social housing
  • Hyde signs repairs contract with Totalmobile
  • Fuelling high performance automation
  • Morgan Sindall’s Carbon Zero decarbonisation tool
  • An ethical approach to arrears
  • Housing and the ever-evolving workplace
  • Supporting residents with home safety risks
  • Less innovation & more service design at RHP
  • Ateb Group outsources IT help desks to Central Networks
  • Capital Letters partners with Evo Digital to tackle homelessness
  • Calico appoints M247 for digital transformation
  • 24/7 care requires 24/7 technology
  • Govtech trends for 2023
  • Are you ready for business process automation?
  • Lincoln council moves to the cloud with Civica
  • Why do IT business improvement projects fail?
  • Flagship and Ebrik launch augmented reality app
  • Following the golden thread
  • Setting the standard for carbon-monoxide protection
  • The business case for data
  • Digital twins – When, not if…
  • Using data to build communities
  • The cyber-security jigsaw’s missing piece – Managed detection & response
  • Cyber-security challenges in housing
  • Digitalising retrofits with SHDF & HomeLink
  • Tips for improving care and support

Footer

Housing Technology
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • Contact
  • Free Subscription
  • Book an event
  • Blog
  • Search All Articles
  • Research
  • Update Your Subscription
  • Privacy Policy

Welcome to the housing Technology – Trusted Information For Business Professionals in HOusing

Housing Technology is the leading technology information service for the UK housing sector and local governments. We have always believed in the fundamental importance of how the UK’s social housing providers use technology to improve their tenants’ lives.

Subscribe to Housing Technology to gain market-leading research, unsurpassed peer networking opportunities and a greater understanding of your role to transform your business.

Copyright © The Intelligent Business Company 2022 | Terms and Conditions | Privacy Policy
Housing Technology is published by the The Intelligent Business Company. A company with limited liability. Registered in England No. 4958057 | Vat Registion No. 833 0069 55.

Registered Business Address: Hoppingwood Farm, Robin Hood Way, London, SW20 0AB | Telephone: +44 (0) 20 8336 2293

htc23 pop banner