Safe as Houses
Phoenix helps one of the UK’s largest housing associations manage its growing pile of data and accelerate digital transformation with VMware solutions.
Accent Housing provides social housing for 35,000 people and has grown considerably in recent years. It now manages 20,000 homes across the UK.
Accent’s existing SAN was coming to its end of life, as was the HPE blade hardware. This infrastructure had failed to keep pace with the increasing amounts of data that were being generated by the group – from customer details, to environmental sensors. The ageing compute was not delivering the performance the organisation required. This threatened its disaster recovery position, creating implications with industry regulations.
Accent Housing has worked with Phoenix for a number of years, particularly around the provision of its Microsoft licences. The Phoenix proposal was to move towards a hyperconverged IT infrastructure (HCI), integrating the compute and storage components of a data centre. This would reduce manual processes and the need for siloed operational expertise, creating a single, converged IT team to monitor and manage compute and storage resources.
Accent currently has a traditional virtualised infrastructure in place based upon 12 VMware vSphere® hosts in Shipley and four vSphere hosts located at a second site in Bradford. The HCI proposal was based on Accent’s existing vSphere while layering on top of VMware vSAN™, which was built into the latest release of the vSphere product.
Phoenix engaged pre-sales, created and ratified a design, installed and migrated workloads, provided training, did full handover and future-proofed the vSAN.