15 November 2013

Your Housing Group (YHG) was formed when Arena Housing Group and Harvest Housing Group merged. It is now one of the UK’s largest social housing providers, with 32,000 homes in north-west England, Yorkshire and Staffordshire.

YHG has to be able to provide its 1,200 staff and emergency repair partners with round-the-clock access to its housing management systems. Prior to the merger, Harvest had lots of different systems across 16 locations which were becoming difficult to manage. Following a tender for the replacement of its IT infrastructure, it chose JMC to implement 40 Dell PowerEdge R710 servers and two Compellent Storage Center arrays, together with Citrix XenDesktop. All storage has been consolidated onto the arrays and Citrix’s desktop virtualisation software is used to provide access to central applications and data.

The two Dell storage arrays (pictured right) support two tiers of storage. Tier one consists of 75 15k Serial Attached SCSI drives, while tier two has 12 7k SAS drives. Together, they provide over 69TB of raw storage and 46TB after RAID.

The arrays feature Dell’s Fluid Data technology for automated tiering. This moves data to the optimal storage resource and is said to help increase performance, improve disk utilisation, and accelerate access to information. “Simple things like loading Microsoft Outlook on a virtual desktop are (now) much quicker,” says Sarah Macadam, YHG’s ICT head of customer service.

She adds that now that the Dell storage arrays have been moved to twin data centres, maintenance can be carried out with very little impact on staff. “That simply wasn’t possible before. If you wanted to perform updates, you had to take all the users off the system.”

The arrays’ built-in resilience enables YHG to take half of its systems offline over a weekend, when user numbers are low, and still support employees with 100 per cent data availability. “That means our staff can continue to respond to any tenant emergency as soon as it’s reported,” says Macadam.