CASE STUDY
T
o plan for future growth, The
Nottingham Building Society has
modernised its IT infrastructure
and consolidated its storage needs to
significantly reduce power consumption,
increase capacity and improve reliability with
Nexsan’s high-density storage platform. offering financial support and advice to
local communities.
The Nottingham Building Society (The
Nottingham) is an award-winning building
society and estate agency which operates
online and via a network of 67 branches
across 11 counties. With expansion plans firmly underway,
The Nottingham embarked on an IT
modernisation programme, with the goal of
improving IT storage capacity and stability.
With online savings accounts and a variety
of other solutions in its portfolio relying on a
secure storage infrastructure, the company
needed to ensure its IT needs could be met
both now and in the future. A major part of
this was also the need to consolidate its IT;
The Nottingham had numerous data centres
and decided to consolidate this down to
three, to help streamline operations and
minimise maintenance.
The eighth largest building society in the
UK by assets, with the fifth biggest branch
presence, it offers a broad range of building
society services such as mortgages and
savings, as well as independent financial
planning, whole-of-market mortgage advice
and local estate agency services.
Founded in 1849 by local Quaker, Samuel
Fox, the modern mutual is owned by its
members with a long and proud history of
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INTELLIGENTCIO
While these values have stayed the same, the
company has continued to grow and in recent
years it has evolved with ambitions to offer a
true omni-channel experience to its customers.
Phillip Crocker, Distributed Technology
Platform Manager at The Nottingham,
explained: “It was definitely time for us to
modernise our IT environment. We wanted
something that was new and more reliable
as we approached full capacity of the current
system. With growth an integral part of the
company’s roadmap, we needed to ensure
our IT could support this.”
Nexsan’s E-Series E18P
The previous IT environment was built using
a mixture of VMware and IBM hardware.
The Nottingham decided to replace the
IBM element as it had reached the end
of its lifespan and explored a number of
alternative solutions. As part of this, the
organisation considered options from
Dell, Nexsan and HP. Crocker said: “I was
confident Nexsan would be a good fit for
us and we also benchmarked with other
providers so we could run a cost comparison,
which affirmed our decision. We’ve been
happy with the service – Nexsan has
delivered what it promised and it was a good
return on investment.”
www.intelligentcio.com