Building for the future: The Guinness Partnership & ANS Group

Building for the future: The Guinness Partnership & ANS Group

Building for the future: The Guinness Partnership & ANS Group The Guinness Partnership is one of the largest affordable housing and care providers in the country. They own and manage more than 60,000 homes and provide housing and care services for 120,000 customers. It is a national organisation that works across England, delivering local housing services through three regional housing companies: Guinness Hermitage in the south west, Guinness Northern Counties in the midlands and the north, and Guinness South in the east and south east. Guinness Care and Support provides care and support services across the country. The Partnership has existed since 1890 when a 200,000 donation from Edward Cecil Guinness, the great grandson of the founder of the Guinness Brewery, created an organisation tasked with improving the lives of ordinary people, many of whom could not afford decent homes. This donation would be worth 15m in today s money and planted a seed that has now grown into a strong, national group of housing associations known as the Guinness Partnership. Although all links with the Guinness Brewery disappeared a long time ago, the partnership is proud to remain true to the original philosophy, defined by Edward Cecil Guinness, of providing affordable and good quality homes in communities that are stable and supportive. In more recent times, The Guinness Partnership assumed its current form as the existing group expanded to include new housing association partners. This created some challenges for IT provision as companies within the Partnership operated on different IT infrastructures, making collaboration across the country difficult. It had become clear that in order to future-proof the Partnership and to allow for any further mergers, a common IT infrastructure was required....the project ran well, with our in-house team and ANS delivering a very good job. We viewed the installation as a shared endeavour; between us we have implemented an excellent solution for the Guinness Partnership that provides an excellent legacy for years to come. Key Business Benefits: > > Single infrastructure delivered across the Partnership > > Return on Investment providing a cost-neutral disaster recovery solution > > Infrastructure is now able to quickly and effortlessly welcome new partners > > ANS SysCare providing support for the Partnership s IT team > > All applications can also benefit from full disaster recovery The Interim Chief Information Officer at The Guinness Partnership, Steve Howells, was engaged by the Partnership to assess the situation and manage a project to bring all areas of the business on to a single infrastructure. The different infrastructures across the Partnership were causing us significant issues, says Howells. There were separate email and log-on systems that meant that staff working at different locations within the organisation were unable to access emails or share files. With thousands of staff members working from hundreds of offices across the country, this had become a big issue as more people were moving offices, either temporarily or permanently, and were unable to access their IT. We needed to create a single infrastructure that would let us migrate all users on to a shared platform, allowing them share files and access emails from anywhere within the Partnership. It would also allow us to migrate any new partners onto this single infrastructure, meaning that such issues would not occur again as we continue to expand. As there was no consistency across the multiple incumbent systems and all applications were completely separate, the Partnership decided to tender for a completely new infrastructure. This was a prerequisite to all planned integration projects and was to be the building block upon which all future IT work was constructed. The Partnership tendered for a supplier that could deliver the project and then provide on-going support once it

was successfully implemented. Rather than specifying how they wanted the project to be completed, the Partnership stated their end-goals and asked respondents to produce an architecture that would allow for successful realisation. Steve was keen to find a company that he felt would be able to work in partnership with Guinness, We needed to find a partner that we felt would be able to deliver the project and work with us on an ongoing basis. ANS offer was excellent commercially; it was the most future-proofed solution with the Cisco UCS, and the intelligent design of Cisco, NetApp and VMware was particularly attractive. On an implementation of this size and complexity there will always be some minor bumps in the road, and so it is very important to be partnered with a company that displays a can do attitude, a willingness to simply sort things out when this is needed. ANS passion for the technology that they are using, and the solution that they are providing, is infectious and this really came across during our site visits. Overall we found the company very impressive. Steve also found that the ANS proposal for a co-managed environment was just what the Partnership needed, we were very happy to find a middle ground between complete outsource and having to manage the entire solution in house. We were offered a solution from ANS where we would still take care of the day-to-day IT operations but would have their SysCare department standing behind us to assist if we encountered complex problems that we couldn t fix. This was perfect as we did not want to have to employ people with the cumulative expertise needed to fully manage our infrastructure. Also with SysCare covering some of our dayto-day monitoring and maintenance tasks our staff are freer to concentrate on customer service. Of the 19 companies that were initially shortlisted for the project, ANS were awarded the contract. The ANS FlexPod design, Infrastructure 3.0, combined Cisco UCS, Nexus switches, NetApp storage and VMware virtualisation technology to provide a unified and scalable infrastructure for the partnership. The network architecture was based on the Cisco validated design (CVD) for FlexPod solutions which We were offered a solution from ANS where we would still take care of the dayto-day IT operations but would have their SysCare department standing behind us to assist if we encountered complex problems that we couldn t fix. This was perfect as we did not want to have to employ people with the cumulative expertise needed to fully manage our infrastructure. Also with SysCare covering some of our day-to-day monitoring and maintenance tasks our staff are freer to concentrate on customer service. ensures exceptional service and is underpinned by the joint support agreements between the major vendors. ANS installed a Cisco UCS platform that used Cisco UCS 6120XP fabric interconnects and nine B200 M2 blades with Intel Westmere processors, 64GB of RAM and Cisco PALO vnic. The storage platform was built with NetApp technology using an FAS3000 range dual controller, 10GbE unified adaptors, 20TB of tier one capacity and 16TB of tier two capacity with fibre channel, icsi, NFS, CIFS & FCoE connectivity and a complete NetApp bundle with all necessary licences. The whole estate was virtualised using VMware vsphere ESXi 4.1 enterprise plus using host profiles for rapid deployment and a distributed switch. Finally Cisco Nexus 5000 switches provided a 10GbE converged network. As well as providing the single infrastructure that the Partnership required, the ANS solution satisfied an additional aspect of the tender: improved disaster recovery capabilities. NetApp SnapShot replicates the entire IT environment throughout the day to provide a near real-time record of the infrastructure in case of an IT disaster occurring. Previously the Partnership had relied on tape for such backup requirements and the new solution has reduced the time it would take to fully restore the IT estate from days or weeks to just a few hours, with either the Partnership, or ANS acting remotely, able to perform a full restoration of the system at the push of a button.

With the new infrastructure now fully implemented, The Guinness Partnership is beginning to see the massive business benefits of the project, We now have an IT system that allows our end-users to perform their everyday tasks and that was the crucial element of the project. We have one email system that covers the whole Partnership and a single platform for all users. We have the base that we wanted to begin work on moving applications and the disaster recovery aspect of the ANS passion for the technology that they are using, and the solution that they are providing, is infectious and this really came across during our site visits. Overall we found the company very impressive. new infrastructure is fantastic. Not only are we more resilient and efficient in the event of a major issue, but as we move our applications to the new infrastructure they also benefit from the improvement. We have performed an upgrade on an asset management application and as it now sits on the new infrastructure, and has been virtualised, it is now also protected by the NetApp SnapShot technology. The Guinness Partnership has realised significant ROI from the project; the re-deployment of existing hardware combined with the impressive savings in power, cooling and cabling made possible by Infrastructure 3 has helped the new disaster recovery solution be as cost neutral as possible. As more applications are added to the new infrastructure, all covered by the new disaster recovery process, the Partnership will realise greater and greater ROI. The Partnership has also agreed an ongoing support contract with ANS Group. Their gold level support package includes proactive monitoring of their entire infrastructure and gives them access to top-level consultants (including CCIEs, NCIEs and VCPs). This saves the Partnership staff costs, while ensuring that they are fully capable of maintaining their new infrastructure. The entire installation was delivered with ANS project management to ensure successful completion, something that Steve thinks was essential to the outcome. Transitions of this type, by their very nature, are painful for organisations. Ours was no different. Having so many offices was a challenge, and at one point our installation plan was a much better indicator of where snow would fall than anything the Met Office could produce; as soon as we changed our plans, the weather did likewise! Despite this the project ran well, with our in-house team and ANS delivering a very good job. We viewed the installation as a shared endeavour; between us we have implemented an excellent solution for the Guinness Partnership that provides an excellent legacy for years to come.

www.ansgroup.co.uk 0161 227 1000