Storing up success for the future

Outsourcer HBS relies on XMA to help deliver resilient and reliable Storage Area Networks to its public sector customers.

Data - and how to store it - has become a major consideration for public and private sector organisations. For that reason, it’s also a key issue for HBS, a company that delivers outsourced business process solutions to councils across the country.
 
With many organisations wanting to outsource their storage to HBS, Infrastructure manager Dominic Barnes-Brown was keen to find a solution to put his confidence in. He wanted to find a partner he could trust to deliver a service that would meet the high standards HBS customers demanded.

So when HBS needed to deliver a high quality storage service to one of its major clients, Lincolnshire County Council, the company asked IT provider XMA for help.

Barnes-Brown says: “We needed to help maintain Lincolnshire’s IT infrastructure, so for about the last six years we have used two storage area networks (SANs) from XMA, an EVA 5000 and an EVA 8000.”

“XMA also regularly provides us with other HP servers, which underpin general network and infrastructure. Everything that is provided to us has a lot of resilience built into it, which means we can be sure that we won’t let any of our customers down.”

Reliable provider

According to Barnes-Brown, the most important requirement for HBS was that they could put their absolute trust in any supplier.

He explains: “We have to look after high quantities of data in a very resilient way. It can be anything from e-mail to documents to personal details. Essentially, it’s the information that many of our customers rely on to keep their organisations running successfully. If we couldn’t manage it properly, it would be a huge issue.

”The fact that we have customers depending on us to help run their business means, in turn, we must be able to rely 100 per cent on our suppliers. We felt that XMA wouldn’t let us down.”

A successful partnership

For six years, the two organisations have worked closely together. So why does the relationship work?

Barnes-Brown says: “XMA understand technology and can advise my staff on what will work best in different scenarios. They also have a good relationship with their suppliers, like HP, so we know they have access to the products that we want.

“Plus, they understand the public sector and as many of our end users are councils, that’s an added bonus for us.”

Best value service

Of course, with any partnership, winning a contract is only the start of the work. Building a long-term relationship with customers is also a key aim for XMA and it was also particularly important for HBS, who act as an outsourcing partner to numerous organisations.

According to Barnes-Brown, a major reason behind his decision to work with XMA was because he felt he would also be able to rely on them if anything went wrong. Although HBS has its own technical staff, it has a maintenance contract with XMA that enables him to request a phone call or site visit about any issues.

He says: “The main reason I have kept using XMA to help with projects for the last six years is because I have received such a good service in that time.

“With IT, there will always be some issues that need resolving and you just can’t avoid problems arising from time to time. With XMA, I know I’m dealing with people who will work hard to sort out any queries quickly. Other suppliers waste time, look for someone else to blame or spend too long trying to find out where a problem has come from. XMA just try to resolve it as fast as possible.”

It isn’t just problem solving that Barnes-Brown appreciates though. He adds: “We’ve partnered with XMA staff on several different projects and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a £2,000 server or a SAN worth £150,000; I always get exactly the same service.

“Irrespective of the value of the order, they are always happy to bend over backwards for me.”