There are few things more frustrating than spending hours on a task when you know there’s a faster, better way to do the same job. Bromford Group IT team members had a pretty good idea that spending up to four hours a day managing backup wasn’t a great use of their time. But with operational data held in various corporate files and network drives and a datacentre running at full capacity storage, they didn’t have much choice. When the company ─ which provides and manages high-quality social housing across England ─ planned a relocation to larger premises, the team leapt at the chance to overhaul the entire IT infrastructure.
The first step was virtualizing on VMware. The second step was to improve data management and redundancy with storage area network (SAN) technology. Bromford chose Dell Compellent Storage Center SANs with Dell Fluid Data™ technology because it hit all the right buttons – being cost-effective, simple to manage, and easy to scale.
Bromford is a non-profit organisation so any operational savings it makes are ploughed back into its much-needed services. So far, Bromford has migrated nearly 70 per cent of its data to lower-cost SATA discs with Dell Compellent Data Progression, which stores data at block level based on frequency of access. It makes other significant savings too. For example, the technician who looks after the SAN spends just an hour a week on maintenance, compared to hours. And, for the personnel responsible for restoring data in the event of a disaster or failure, it takes just minutes to recover data – a far cry from the two to three hours it took before implementing Dell Compellent. In fact, Bromford saves around £200,000 a year as part of its IT overhaul. Steve Percival, Director of ICT at Bromford puts a significant part of this down to the organisation’s flexible, highly-available Dell Compellent environment, which he says “pretty much runs itself.”
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