Rochdale Boroughwide Housing: tenant and employee co-owned mutual housing society – approximately 13,000 homes.
Rochdale Boroughwide Housing: tenant and employee co-owned mutual housing society – approximately 13,000 homes.
Formed in 2012, Rochdale Boroughwide Housing (RBH) is the UK’s first tenant and employee co-owned mutual housing society. With approximately 13,000 homes within its local area, the company is one of Central’s largest and longest-standing clients – which has seen us work alongside the team, providing IT support services and multiprotocol label switching (MPLS), for over a decade.
Having long embraced a culture of hybrid working, RBH has systems in place to allow its employees to work from wherever they choose. Further bolstering this flexibility is the availability of a number of dedicated workspaces throughout the borough. As a result, RBH’s IT infrastructure is almost exclusively virtual, with on-premise equipment sited in a co-location space.
With a disaster recovery (DR) setup approaching a decade old, regular updates were no longer maintaining the systems at an optimal level. Tests showed that should the business need to enact a DR failover it would be unnecessarily difficult, with an excessive time and work burden - which would have a broader impact upon Business Continuity Plans (BCP).
Meanwhile, anticipating fluctuations in required storage capacity due to planned software migration — namely an upcoming switch to SaaS and cloud-based technologies — RBH required a scaleable storage solution that could flex up and down as required.
Darren Shaw, infrastructure and platforms specialist at RBH, comments:
“With a longstanding partnership already in place, Central was our first port of call for advice when it came to refreshing our infrastructure and exploring our disaster recovery options. Having shared our requirements and need for increased flexibility, the team was only too willing to work with us to meet our needs. We’re pleased to have extended our partnership with them, and to have the extra peace of mind that this offers us.”
With sites in Manchester and Luton, Central proposed using one of its own private cloud facilities to securely house RBH’s infrastructure. Adhering with regulations which stipulate that, as a precautionary measure, there should be a distance of 30 miles between an office and its disaster recovery facility, Luton was selected as the most appropriate option.
In addition, as existing Veeam Backup users, Central suggested that RBH utilised the functionality more broadly, making the most of the DR option — rather than pursuing an additional provider. This would mean that the organisation could set up the DR facility to run parallel with its existing one, ensuring the changeover would be seamless.
Forming part of the service, the team at Central worked with RBH to plan out which servers should be backed up and at what frequency, while also devising a robust recovery plan. This detailed the steps to be taken in the event of a DR failover event — with clearly assigned roles and responsibilities to ensure speed and accuracy.
The team now benefits from a secure and modern disaster recovery solution, which is entirely maintained and updated by Central’s team. In the event of a software failure, RBH will have the ability to re-gain access to their system in approximately 20 mins, via the cloud-based service in Luton.
This allowed the team to significantly reduce its Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) figures — a crucial safety measure.
Opting for a three-year contract, the team benefits from a flexible package which meets their needs. The ability to scale up and down in terms of storage, as well as in price, has provided flexibility for the organisation as it explores modernising other elements of its provision.
With new systems in place, the organisation’s old equipment has since been decommissioned.
John Blackburn, operations director, at Central Networks and Technologies, comments:
“We have a great relationship with RBH, having worked with the organisation for over a decade. The insight that we’ve gained into the business over the years, helps us to quickly identify the solutions that we know will work for them. The team approached us with a requirement for flexibility, and this is something that we were pleased to be able to offer. Our teams work in a true partnership when it comes to our support offering, expanding our relationship to encompass a disaster recovery service feels like a natural next step.”
To summarise how it felt to work alongside Central on a project of this type, Darren Shaw, infrastructure and platforms specialist at RBH, said:
“The experience working with Central has been very positive, and the outcomes even more so. Once we’d decided upon the direction of travel, we gave the team the information they needed, and they made it happen. There was no stress or drama. We knew that Central would deliver, and they did — first time.”
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