Case Studies
National Housing Federation
The National Housing Federation represents 1400 independent, not-for-profit housing associations in England and is the voice of affordable housing. Its members provide over two million affordable homes for over four million people.
The Federation employs over 142 staff across England, the majority of whom work from their Holborn based ‘Lion Court’ offices. Upon moving to their new premises ‘Lion Court’ in 2004, the IT team were able to take a close look at the Federation’s IT infrastructure. With network monitoring being an important part of this, finding a solution that was easy to integrate and use was of prime importance. CHOOSING THE RIGHT SYSTEM The National Housing Federation had four key requirements which any new system had meet. These were: 1. Must be easy to integrate into the IT infrastructure
2. Initial financial outlay must be transparent. No hidden costs!
3. Return on Investment must become apparent early on
4. Must be easy to use – the IT department didn’t have time for lengthy training sessions
on complicated software Various high profile network monitoring solutions were investigated but, in terms of fitting all of the above criteria, there really was only one choice – the Mutiny Critical Services Monitor. Says Rob Green, National Housing Federation’s Head of ICT: “As with any decision that we make relating to our IT systems, we had to look at all of the options available. Our criteria were very strict. Due to our organisation’s size, many of the network monitoring applications out there just weren’t right for us – they were either too complicated, took too long to install, or were much too expensive – we trialled Mutiny and found it satisfied all our needs." WHAT DOES MUTINY MONITOR AT NHF? Mutiny has the capability to monitor up to 50 nodes on the NHF’s IT infrastructure. The following applications and processes are monitored: Monitoring of all NHF Critical Servers including: - email
- corporate database
- financial systems
Monitoring of the NHF computer network: Monitoring of the NHF ‘BlackBerrytm’ server THE RESULTS The National Housing Federation has been using Mutiny since December 2005. In the time that the team has been using the appliance it has already proved its worth. Some key benefits that the National Housing Federation has seen are as follows: A PROACTIVE TEAM – Within a few short weeks Mutiny’s unique SMS text alerting capabilities enabled the IT team to work more proactively when it came to dealing with issues. Network issues were alerted to the team BEFORE major problems occurred, thus preventing unnecessary downtime. LESS TRAINING, MORE SPEED – Mutiny is a network monitoring appliance. Most of the configuration has already been done. It’s simply a case of plugging the box in and, with minimum training time, seeing the results. Within half a day Mutiny had been integrated into the Federation’s IT infrastructure and IT staff had been trained on how to best make use of the Mutiny system. A BESPOKE SOLUTION - Since its integration in December 2005, the Federation has had a further half day’s training on the latest version of Mutiny. With version 3.5, the Federation is now able to monitor and alert on the critical interfaces within the organisation. 24/7 MONITORING – Mutiny monitors the network all day and every day. The Federation’s IT team can feel confident that the Mutiny system is monitoring for potential problems around the clock. Concludes Rob Green: “This is great because, if there has been a problem overnight, the team will have been alerted so that it can be resolved first thing in the morning.” MUTINY COMMENT Says Dudley Moor-Radford, Mutiny’s Commercial Director: “Any association or business which deals with large numbers of customers or clients will quickly see the benefits of using the Mutiny appliance. The IT team’s ability to work proactively is the key to overall success for any business. Unplanned downtime can be very costly indeed and, put simply, Mutiny can stop this happening.” Mutiny has also been selected to become a National Housing Federation Affinity Partner.
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