Bield Housing & Care

Project Summary

NG-IT’s latest SmartStack™ implementation for Bield Housing & Care will reduce long term capital and operational expenditure and will provide the agility for the organisation to meet its ever changing data centre demands.

Setting the Scene

Founded over 40 years ago, Bield Housing & Care provides a range of housing and care services for more than 15,000 older people across 23 local authority areas in Scotland from its offices in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee. The company employs over 1250 staff as well as an army of volunteers who provide a range of activities for older people.

The Challenge

Bield Housing were looking for a new platform to initially underpin the requirements for a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, with the ability to scale and provide a consolidated infrastructure for all of their business critical services. Their existing solution was limited in performance and capacity efficiency, and was neither cost effective or scaleable. The new solution needed to provide a mixed workload environment for services across two geographically dispersed data centres, with active services being provided from each.

The Solution

NG-IT has installed a SmartStack solution at two main data centre sites. The entire stack only consumes about the quarter of a standard rack whilst still providing capacity and performance for Bield Housing’s immediate and future requirements. Furthermore, the architecture is fully scalable so whether the organisation needs more server processing power, or more storage performance, they have the ability to upgrade the system in a granular way to provide only what they need at a significantly lower cost than traditional platforms.

After initially completing a pilot phase for VDI, NG-IT has also helped Bield roll out a Citrix Xenapp and Xendesktop infrastructure to 400+ users across many remote sites. All of which is hosted on the organisations SmartStack infrastructure.