The background
South West Communications Group revolutionises the way Stags estate agents operates its business with a managed server solution that uses a RAID 5 scheme.
Stags is an estate agent that serves the South West of England. It boasts 19 offices across Somerset, Devon and Cornwall as well as 1 in London. It deals with the sale and letting of residential and commercial property and offers professional and agricultural services, including estate management, planning and valuations.
The challenge
All of Stags’ offices used individual servers, which meant any information added onto 1 server could not be shared immediately with the other branches. As each office had its own database, property details uploaded at 1 branch were not swiftly available to the rest of the offices meaning that they were potentially missing out on customer interest elsewhere in the region.
Stags was keen to have a system that would update all the offices at the same time to make sure agents and their clients did not miss out on the latest information available. Such prompt updating may not be as crucial for estate agents elsewhere in the UK, but people who buy property in the South West do not necessarily live in the area themselves and so can often be interested in the entire region. Stags sought out a web-enabled database but then required a secure and resilient server hosting service facility to run it from.
The solution
South West Communications Group advised Stags to host its application on a resilient RAID 5 server meaning that fault tolerance is automatically built in as any disk can be lost within the server without loss of data. The total solution included the following:
- Complete managed server service
- Resilience via RAID 5
- 24-hour monitoring
- Network security with firewall protection
- Fire detection and suppression systems
- Uninterrupted power supply
- Business class security protection
- Automatic data backups
- ADSL connections at all offices
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