Platform Housing Group

About the customer

Platform Housing Group is one of the UK’s largest housing associations, managing around 50,000 affordable homes, plus supported housing and retirement villages across the midlands. Their 2,300 employees provide vital services that help 120,000 residents thrive, including education, employment support and financial advice.

The challenge

Platform Housing Group’s estate was increasingly exposed to risk and inefficiency at a scale that directly affected residents and frontline services:

• End-of-Support Lifecycle (EOSL): core infrastructure approaching end-of-life, creating support and reliability exposure, meaning that service interruptions could affect residents’ access to vital services.
• Single WAN link: limited resilience, replication, and failover capability which would mean longer recovery times after incidents.
• Overprovisioning: inefficient resource utilisation which drove unnecessary cost.
• Operational inefficiencies: high IT overhead to maintain ageing systems.
• Scalability & flexibility needs: requirement for on-demand scaling and flexible consumption models to respond to peaks and growth opportunities.
• Business continuity & resilience requirements: need for zero-RPO/RTO failover and improved disaster recovery to protect services used by staff and tenants.

“We were facing real strain from ageing systems and knew it was time to future proof our estate. We support thousands of residents, and downtime is not an option. Wavenet’s team managed the upgrade with minimal disruption and genuine care for our communities. The result has made a tangible difference to our operations and to residents’ experiences, and we couldn’t be happier.”

Neil Clarke, Head of Technology Operations & Cloud at Platform Housing Group

The solution

We proposed a modern platform, designed with growth and capacity in mind, to radically simplify Platform Housing Group’s existing infrastructure, built on HPE Alletra dHCI and HPE Greenlake, with the following key elements:

• Compute: transition to HPE ProLiant Gen11 servers with AMD EPYC processors.
• Storage: adoption of HPE and 80TB usuable capacity and future expandability.
• Flexible procurement options: as-a-service, subscription, or upfront purchase.
• HPE Greenlake metering: usage-based billing with an 80% reserved capacity baseline and 20% buffer for burstable demand.
• Always-on availability: via a stretched Metro Cluster with synchronous replication and automatic failover.
• Integrated backup: using Veeam for streamlined data protection and recovery.
• Cloud-based monitoring and analytics: for proactive support and simplified operations.
• Full delivery lifecycle: technical workshops, low-level design, commissioning, testing and validation.
• Dedicated project management and contingency planning to minimise operational impact.

The results

By replacing legacy systems with a HPE Alletra dHCI via HPE GreenLake produced a strategic upgrade with measurable operational, financial, and ESG benefits:

• Business continuity and resilience – synchronous replication and stretched cluster deliver near zero RPO/RTO and remove single link failover risk.
• Reduced operational overhead – modernised platform and cloud monitoring reduced routine maintenance effort and simplified support for all 1,600 employees.
• ESG benefits – energy efficiency, estimated 25% reduction in energy use, space optimisation – 33% reduction in data centre footprint, licensing savings – up to 50% reduction in VMware licensing costs.
• Reduced costs - utilising trade-in from existing hardware and the complete elimination of failover solution costs via vMSC.

“The upgrade directly supports the services we pride ourselves on, and what our residents rely on – from community wellbeing meetings to financial advice – and we’ve received some really great feedback - on faster service for instance. It allows us to continue providing the high standard of housing services that our communities rely on.”

Neil Clarke, Head of Technology Operations & Cloud at Platform Housing Group

If you’d like to find out more about how we could help your business with the areas covered in this case study, then get in touch at enquiries@wavenet.co.uk.