Southway Housing Trust

Company background

Southway Housing Trust own and manage almost 6,000 homes across South Manchester, providing services for tenants, residents, the environment and wider community. Southway’s digital transformation comprised a number of individually significant projects, leading to a need for the Housing Trust to look for a provider who could competently manage the separate technical tasks and coordinate the whole project successfully, on time and on budget. The relocation of the business to new purpose built premises coincided with a need to refresh the core IT infrastructure, review disaster recovery arrangements and update key Microsoft and Citrix software. The proposed solution needed to be fully resilient and fit for purpose to meet the needs of the business for the next 5 years.

Testimonial

“LIMA’s in-depth digital transformation project for us formed part of our relocation to new premises at Southern Gate on Princess Road in Didsbury. This was a hugely significant, business critical piece of work for us as not only did it ensure operations continued seamlessly during the move but it has also enabled us to enhance the high levels of customer service we provide to thousands of residents across South Manchester. From the outset, we were wholly confident in LIMA’s ability and expertise and our satisfaction at the end result is clearly evidenced in us now signing a five-year managed service contract.”

Stephen Murden, Head of IT at Southway Housing Trust

LIMAs Methodology

Learn

At the start of the partnership both parties undertook a strategic review which involved LIMA’s Account Management and Solutions Teams working with Southway’s Senior Leadership Team to develop a strategic IT roadmap. The solution design needed to take a holistic view of the overall infrastructure requirements. This included: systems and application dependencies, disaster recovery and business continuity requirements as well as business initiatives and upcoming projects that demand IT Infrastructure resources. LIMA then presented a gap analysis. This demonstrated our understanding of what was required in terms of business process and/or technical services to achieve the customer’s vision of operating in a more efficient manner.

Implement

We implemented a FlexPod (NetApp storage and compute/networking from Cisco) in an active/passive datacentre architecture with the secondary datacentre acting as a DR Failover site. This provides Southway with efficiency, availability, performance and scalability while streamlining failover between the two datacentres with minimal RTO and without the need to invest in extensive infrastructure compute resources for DR and business continuity services.

LIMA’s Cloud platform provides failover compute capacity in the event of DR failover without the need for capital expenditure to deploy standby DR compute cluster. We support this with a PROACTIV managed backup and restore service to provide off-site backup of systems and data with a retention policy that meets the requirements of 30 daily, 12 monthly and 7 annual backup retention.

In addition, we upgraded and migrated the existing Microsoft Active Directory domain into a Windows Server 2016 and deployed a highly available Microsoft SQL Standard 2016 failover cluster to consolidate all SQL databases and provide load balancing of SQL instances across two high performance SQL servers.

The project was managed by our PRINCE2 qualified Project Management team. A critical element of the project delivery was the documentation and handover of each phase to the Southway team. In total 12 days of on site on-to-one training were delivered by LIMA engineers taking place the close of each phase.

Technologies included: FlexPod , NetApp Backup E-Series, VMware vSphere 6.5, Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp, Microsoft Active Directory.

Manage

LIMA provide asset based support from a fully managed 24/7 PROACTIV service to a ACTIV Response. The granularity of the service contract across every aspect of the technology we delivered means that Southway were able to tailor the service to maximise existing in house expertise and outsource where skills were limited. Utilising LIMA for second and third line support provided Southway the flexibility to realign roles to make better use of skills and resources across the extended virtual team. Southway access LIMA’s ITIL Service Desk for Release Management, Change Management and Execution and LIMA Monitoring as well as support escalation.

Assess

Service Delivery Reports offer a means of measuring service performance, trends, and availability by utilising key management processes to develop continuous service Improvement strategies and service improvement plans. LIMA provide regular Service Reviews, which are a two way process designed to provide Southway Housing Group and LIMA with the opportunity to discuss the ongoing partnership. The service reports and review sessions encourage key stakeholder involvement to ensure the services being delivered meets the needs of the business and offers continued business justification.

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