Managed server solution ensures Stags’ clients never miss out on the most up-to-date property information
South West Communications Group has revolutionised the way Stags estate agents operates its business with a managed server solution.
Previously, all of Stags’ offices used individual servers, which meant any information added onto one server could not be shared immediately with its other branches. Each office had its own database and therefore property details uploaded at one branch were not swiftly available to the rest of the offices, potentially missing out on customer interest elsewhere in the region.
John Holdstock, South West Communications Group’s IT director, said: “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 most up-to-date information. 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 already and can be interested in the entire region. Stags had already sought out a web-enabled database but then required a secure and resilient hosting solution to run it from.”
South West Communications Group advised Stags to host their 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 solution in its entirety included a complete managed server service, which meant South West Communications Group provided Stags with the rack space to store managed server equipment in its safe and secure Data Centre in Exeter that boasts built-in fire protection, privacy and power resilience. South West Communications Group also provided data backup to Stags using its own solution called storeiP. This service automatically backs up any changes made to the estate agent’s data on a daily basis to ensure data can be retrieved in the rare event of a system failure.
Mr Holdstock added: “We took on all the responsibility of Stags’ server needs with our managed server service while also using our Data Centre infrastructure and team of highly qualified IT engineers to maintain the equipment, programs and environment the server relies on. Stags could have chosen to work from a single server based at one of their offices, but it would have been highly unlikely it would be able to survive a power cut or loss of connectivity in the same way South West Communications Group’s Data Centre can.”
Peter Symons, partner of Stags, said: “We are delighted to have made the switch. We found South West Communications Group easy to deal with and, being a local company, highly accessible. To be honest, we cannot know the detail of what we have signed up to. We are happy to rely on South West Communications Group to provide the advice that we need.”
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 [back to top]
