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Saxon Weald - Virtualisation

Saxon Weald improved IT performance, reduced their physical servers by two thirds and cut their IT and power costs enormously thanks to Montal's implementation of a virtual server environment.

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The Organisation 

Saxon Weald aims to improve the quality of life of their tenants and the communities they work with by providing excellent homes and services. They own and manage more than 5000 properties across Sussex and Hampshire, including general needs, retirement and shared ownership homes.

As a growing organisation, it is important that Saxon Weald maintain their high standards of service as they expand – and having the right technology in place plays a big part in making that happen.

The Business Need

When Saxon Weald decided to take on new remote schemes, they needed to find a solution that would allow them to centralise IT management and roll out new software applications smoothly across their different sites.  Rising energy and support costs combined with rapidly diminishing rack space meant the organisation had to reduce the number of servers they had on site, and a technology refresh on aging hardware and out-of-date operating systems was long overdue.

The Solution

Saxon Weald’s requirements made virtualisation a clear choice.  By using partitioning to create multiple, independent “virtual” servers on each physical server, they would immediately be able to cut their power consumption, free up space in their server room and simplify system management and support.

Technical Specialist Mark Sims and Business Development Manager Mike Baker worked very closely with Saxon Weald’s IT Manager, Mark Ansell, to design exactly the right solution.  Rather than a simple virtualisation conversion of existing servers, Montal recommended building a completely new, bespoke system for Saxon Weald.  This route ensured they would benefit from all the latest software revisions and, very importantly, it would keep downtime to a minimum and redistribute applications and infrastructure more effectively, to allow Saxon Weald to conform to best practices. 

Montal's Approach

Montal built the new, virtualised infrastructure alongside Saxon Weald’s existing environment to minimise disruption to their users, giving Mark Ansell an ideal opportunity to revisit and restructure his active directory, ensuring it was perfectly up to date in time for the migration. 

Montal was available to Saxon Weald every step of the way, always putting users’ needs first and, as Mark Ansell told us, “always willing to go that extra mile to ensure everything is perfect”.  Mike and Mark worked collaboratively with Saxon Weald’s internal IT department, making sure they fully understood how their new systems were set up and how to migrate on to new servers, enabling them to more effectively manage the new system going forward.  Saxon Weald rolled out the new Citrix farm to all their remote sites while Montal took charge of the main office, covering around 150 users.

An Unbeatable Result

Saxon Weald is overjoyed with their new system, which has kick-started a much needed refresh and clean-up of group policies and the file server as a result, meaning “the entire network has been given a new lease of life”.

With Montal’s help and guidance on the best way to benefit from Virtualisation, Saxon Weald reduced their physicals servers by almost two-thirds – from 16 down to just 6.  Mark Ansell has calculated that, considering hardware depreciation and power costs, based over five years moving over to a virtual environment will yield a saving of £65,000 compared to staying in a traditional server environment.

Saxon Weald is also making significant financial savings on man hours.  Now, whenever they need a new server it can be built and ready to go in half an hour, whereas before it took a huge amount of time to source it, wait for it to be delivered and then build it.  Plus, with less physical servers to watch over, their IT team  can spend more time on high-value projects which benefits the team, the end users and the organisation alike.

Perhaps most importantly, the organisation’s IT users are a lot happier as the network is running far quicker, vastly improving the end user experience. All in all, Mark Ansell told us,

“I couldn’t be happier with the implementation and result, and I found the migration stress and pain free!”