Henley Properties to shift data centre to IaaS

Home builder Henley Properties' brand is synonymous with the act of relocation – now its data is set to make a big move interstate.

Henley’s core IT systems are currently run from three racks of equipment hosted out of Interactive’s co-location facility in Port Melbourne, a short drive from the property developer’s head office in Mount Waverley.

In a major overhaul of its data centre strategy, Henley has signed a 36-month contract with Brennan IT that will see it move to an infrastructure-as-a-service setup, based out of the Sydney Equinix data centre.

The company hopes the move will allow it to reduce its internal hardware footprint to the equivalent of just half a rack, consisting of servers for local file replication and Riverbed LAN equipment.

Henley CIO Jeremy Bree told iTnews the company intends to complete the shift by the end of the year.

“It’s an ambitious move, but it’s not as though it’s something we decided to do yesterday - we’ve been planning the move since around this time last year.

“But we’re also not going to rush this. If there are any issues with the move, we will pull back."

The move is designed to reduce capital costs for the company, while also removing some maintenance headaches for the IT team.

“The big cost implications are that it alleviates the need to do some core upgrades, while turning capital costs into operational costs,” Bree said.

“It also allows us to be a lot more flexible. Instead of needing to do a lot of capacity planning to work out how many servers we need, it’s now a matter of just emailing the provisioning team.

“Because we’re going into IaaS, and someone else’s virtual environment… we no longer have to worry about things like hardware maintenance and storage requirements.”

Bree expects the move to IaaS will allow his infrastructure staff to tackle new projects, and he's planning to redeploy the now-redundant servers for testing purposes.

“Hopefully, this means happier IT staff. We run a lean team as it is, but this will cut down on mundane hardware support and backup tasks, and free up resources for new projects,” he said.

“The old servers will come in-house for some test and development work. That said, if we never have to turn them on again, that would be great – being old servers, they use a lot of power.”

Application updates

The data centre migration is also being used by the company as an opportunity to roll out updates to some of its applications.

The company is upgrading its servers to Windows Server 2012 R2, and will also update Office 365 and Citrix virtual desktop.

“The big change we expect to provide to our staff is a more stable and up-to-date work environment,” Bree said.

Henley is also currently developing a document management platform designed to integrate with the company’s Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP system.

It hopes the platform will make it easier for head office, suppliers and tradespeople on construction sites to share key documents.

“Google Documents and Dropbox are great for small businesses. But we run 2000 jobs a year, which require around 100 to 200 purchase orders each, and each of those orders can require anything from one to seven or eight documents,” he said.

“So for us, those document systems don’t work. We’re building it to be tied with our ERP system, and we’re going with HTML5 as a front end rather than a mobile app."