Yorkshire Water enhances customer service with new storage environment
Posted: Thursday 26th March 2009
Affiniti provides storage environment to implement business applications for improved customer service; Reliable, resilient and scalable storage area network improves business continuity and meets capacity demands for data protection and storage.
One of the UK’s largest utility companies, Yorkshire Water, has turned to Affiniti to ensure the best quality of service to its four million customers. Through Affiniti’s new expanded storage environment, the organisation will be able to improve availability of key applications and also address future data storage demands associated with both new and existing business applications to boost customer service.It will also allow the organisation to keep up with capacity demands related to data protection and storage, as well as the increasing use of rich media. Unplanned outages will be significantly diminished and business continuity will be improved thanks to its simplified architecture and dual system for added fail-over protection. The storage area network is currently configured for a total raw capacity of 47 terabytes, with the ability to scale up to 900 terabytes.
The key driver for installing the new storage environment was to replacing aging technology with an enterprise solution capable of delivering high availability and meet the future growth of Yorkshire Water’s business applications thus ensuring key customer service targets set out by the regulator are met. Unlike other utilities, domestic customers are unable to choose their water supplier, so the regulator evaluates each supplier’s performance against specific customer service targets to ensure they deliver a good quality service.
Neil Schofield, Storage Technologies Manager for Yorkshire Water said, “At Yorkshire Water we pride ourselves on our technology initiatives to drive the business forward. So when 40 percent of our storage equipment approached end-of-life, we decided to work with a market leader to make the most of this opportunity. We chose Affiniti because we liked their flexible and consultative approach, and because they were a trusted partner though our strong existing relationship with KCOM. In the end, they did not let us down, delivering a tailored solution and a seamless migration.”
The project kicked off in November 2007 with Affiniti providing in-depth consultation about the replacement of the storage environment. Following this, Affiniti designed and created a flexible configuration to migrate Yorkshire Water’s business seamlessly from its existing legacy platform to the new platform incorporating EMC’s Symmetrix DMX-4 storage system. As part of the project, Affiniti implemented the DMX-4 storage system into Yorkshire Water’s two data centres, one of which was a new build. In addition to addressing the storage requirements Affiniti successfully managed and implemented telephony services into the new data centre.
Paul Renucci, Executive Director at Affiniti commented, “Yorkshire Water has been recognised as the best utility company in the UK for three years running*. With its new, resilient and scalable storage environment, and forward-looking IT strategy, Yorkshire Water will continue to go from strength to strength. We are very glad to be a part of this important step, and look forward to working with them in the future.”
Affiniti has been working with Yorkshire Water for over 10 years and has been heavily involved in the supply and management of its telephony platforms and non-geographical number services.
