About the client
Newton Property Management started out in 2001 with one ambition, to shake up the property management business. When you choose Newton as your property manager, you choose the Newton Way – a modern approach to factoring that puts people first and profit second.
Their company ethos and customer retention has enabled Newton to grow into one of Scotland’s largest property factors with over 23,000 properties under management. Headquartered in Glasgow but with offices throughout the country Newton manage properties from Ullapool to Gretna.
The Challenge
Due to the pace of growth Newton have experienced over the last 5 years combined with legacy application requirements they had grown into a mixed bag of physical and virtual servers. Therefore, management, warranty and end of life issues across components, products and software was beginning to become a major issue.
Individual downtime and dependencies, scalability and management issues with multiple consoles and complexity of infrastructure turned out to be a hurdle in their smooth operations. With the business continuing to grow at the same pace Newton knew they had to bring down the total cost of ownership, opex costs linked to space, electrical power consumption as well as air-conditioning cooling requirements needed for all the physical servers. There were also additional costs linked to periodic maintenance, downtime and DR recovery testing.
The Solution
Certum advised moving from a traditional infrastructure to a hyper converged infrastructure (HCI). HCI takes compute, storage and virtualisation into a single management solution. The HCI platform replaces silos of servers, storage, virtualisation and a host of management tools and processes. As a Microsoft Gold partner and DELL Gold partner we have the expertise and experience to recommend a stack of DELL R540 servers running Server 2019 datacentre. This provides a 100% software defined storage solution running on a hypervisor that combines the compute and storage performance across multiple servers, therefore eliminating the multiple tiers of hardware, software and management into a single management tier. As requirements change and expansion is required due to growth or external factors Newton simply add another node into the HCI server stack to aggregate the resources across the Hyper converged infrastructure.
“As a result of consistent and sustained growth, Newton Property Management now have three national offices – this increase in offices and resources has meant we rely heavily on system performance, speed and reliability. As a result of our old kit reaching the end of its life, we were faced with a decision to replace like for like, or future proof to cover us for the steady growth which was set to continue. Certum made what could have been a painful process, an absolute breeze. Everything from the initial quoting, right through to install – Certum were informative, efficient and on the ball. We knew we were in safe hands with Certum overseeing the project.”
– Kirsten O’Neill, Director
The Business Benefits
Overall management and operations are massively simplified with only one system to manage. Costs are greatly reduced as over provisioning is eliminated and management time is greatly reduced due to the reduction in complexity. They have reclaimed space and reduced power consumption which aligns with their 2020 Green Vision. Newton are now able to accelerate deployment of services, have improved performance, the peace of mind of having a highly available infrastructure capable of sustaining multiple hardware failures without bringing down services and all at a fraction of the cost of building out a traditional IT infrastructure.