Virtualisation investment boosts Bernicia Group

Work conducted by virtualisation specialist SITS Group has enabled the housing organisation to cut costs, speed up its processes and bolster security.

The firm, which has 8,000+ homes in the North East of England, worked with SITS to virtualise over 80 physical servers and switch from Microsoft Hyper-V to VMware software.

Bernicia’s storage architecture has been reduced from 18 rack units to three and, with a second virtual infrastructure deployed securely off-site, the firm’s total complete systems recovery time is now an average of just 28 minutes.

Where previously Bernicia’s DR process would have taken days to work through, it can now be activated – and continually tested and monitored – at the push of a button using VMware’s Site Recovery Manager software.

SITS has also implemented a resilient Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) using VMWare Horizon View, providing a faster and universal experience for remote and in-office staff.

All 300+ users can now access software via a virtual PC operating centrally on Bernicia’s servers. All software updates, security and other administrative burdens are now conducted on this central system, providing a consistent PC user experience and cutting IT maintenance time dramatically.

Existing PCs are being converted into thin clients and are now centrally managed by IGEL’s Universal Management Suite, the device management platform. Horizon View software has also been installed on laptops, tablets and off-site PC’s, increasingly used by Bernicia staff as the organisation expands and remote working rises.
Gary Hind, head of ICT at Bernicia, said: “Management of our desktop estate has become much easier as upgrades, patches and application rollouts only need to be performed centrally and we have much better control of our software licensing.

“Overall, our new technology infrastructure has allowed us to make major savings in several areas, including in licensing, power consumption and DR contracts, as well as significantly improving our productivity.”

Russell Henderson, technical director of SITS Group, said: “We’ve worked with a number of businesses in the housing sector who, like Bernicia, are switching on to the many benefits of virtualisation. Given the important, round-the-clock demands of tenants, being able to respond quickly is essential, while any downtime has the potential to have serious consequences. We believe a fully virtualised environment is the ideal solution to the unique set of challenges faced by housing sector firms.”

Alongside Bernicia, other housing providers working with SITS Group include Birmingham-based Trident Social Investment Group and Isos Housing, which manages over 12,000 homes in North East England.

SITS enabled Isos to improve its customer services and functionality by installing a Virtual Desktop environment to manage over 300 users. In a five year period the new system is expected to save the organisation around £50,000, as well as other time and resource savings.

SITS specialises in using best-of-breed products to provide a range of services, including server and desktop virtualisation, business continuity, enterprise storage, data centre facilities and health check and planning services. Earlier this year the business won the coveted Customer Choice Award from Data Protection Specialists Veeam Software.