The background

South West Communications Group provides Landmark with failsafe data centre hosting for its vital IT equipment.

Landmark is based in Exeter and Henley-on-Thames and is the UK’s leading supplier of digital mapping, property and environmental risk information. Landmark has an unrivalled source of large scale current and historic digital maps, together with high quality environmental risk and planning information.

Landmark has developed a comprehensive database, built around agreements with statutory and non-statutory organisations, to take information and assemble Britain’s leading database of property and land search information.

The challenge

Faced with further expansion of the IT infrastructure at its Exeter office, Landmark had to decide where to locate its additional equipment as sufficient electrical power was not available without significantly investing in a new power feed, an electrical substation and the associated environmental and cooling systems.

In addition, Landmark needed to address the requirement to locate a complete duplicate of its server and storage area network (SAN) infrastructure at an off-site location to ensure its information services would be available to customers in the event of a disaster at the Exeter office.

South West Communications Group had already provided Landmark with a hosted server solution comprising 26 servers, switches, firewalls and a SAN back in 2003 so they knew 1st hand about the excellent facilities and services provided from their Exeter data centre.

The data centre was built to leading-edge standards to provide the best in class for security, environment, power, fire prevention and network connectivity and is maintained by a certified networking and security team with years of experience in managing and monitoring enterprise-level networks. It offers a highly resilient Cisco infrastructure with no single point of failure. As a result, the data centre provides scalable, high availability, flexible solutions to meet the needs of the public and private sector.

The solution

Having already had a positive experience of the data centre’s quality, Landmark requested South West Communications Group’s assistance to provide:

•    Co-location rack space for an additional 140 servers, switches and firewalls
•    4 SAN enclosures together with a fire safe for backup tape storage
•    Built-in superior electrical capacity
•    Real-time off-site data synchronisation
•    Fire protection
•    High level security
•    Resilience
•    24/7 support

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