Meritage homes: improving costs, uptime & customer satisfaction

INDUSTRY:

Home Construction

CHALLENGE:

Improve power capacity with noservice interruption

SOLUTION:

Iron Mountain Data Centers

VALUE:

• Increase in uptime which has resulted in improved productivity and operational effectiveness
• 30% reduction in monthly data center costs
• Enterprise-grade data center space, power and network access

AT HOME WITH THE RIGHT COLOCATION PARTNER

Since 1985, Meritage Homes has been designing and building single-family attached and detached homes. The company serves a range of customers including first-time, move-up, luxury, and active adult home buyers in 12 metropolitan areas throughout Arizona, Texas, California, Nevada, Colorado, and Florida. But their colocation provider’s limitations were negatively affecting the home builder’s IT operations. Meritage had been working with another colocation provider and started to experience limitations that were beginning to impact everyday operations. “They were unable to meet our power requirements, leaving us at a power standstill,” says Chris Filandro, CIO for Meritage Homes. In addition to not being able to scale power capacity, the colocation provider’s decentralized infrastructure proved to be inefficient and caused significant performance and customer service issues. “They had one team managing the facility, another team managing the ISPs and another managing the cross-connect service. This disparate management structure translated into increased cost, increased downtime and decreased customer satisfaction for us,” says Filandro. “We were getting less for more - we needed a change.”

"Iron Mountain was able to get us moved and powered up in short order with no interruption in service."

"“ Chris Filandro, CIO, Meritage Homes

Improving costs, uptime & customer satisfaction

Meritage’s team looked at a number of data center solutions providers and determined that while price was important, the service level was even more important— especially given Chris’ most recent experiences.

He had worked with the Iron Mountain team in the past and liked the company’s design-build-operate methodology and approach.

The decision to select Iron Mountain for Meritage’s colocation partner turned out to be an easy one.

“We chose them because of their expertise, knowledge and customer service,” says Filandro. “We were looking for a provider that was focused on providing enterprisegrade data center space, power and network access—Iron Mountain had it all.”

In addition to those requirements, Meritage wanted a provider that was flexible and could quickly scale to meet the changing demands of their business. With Iron Mountain, they found exactly what they needed.

Now the company’s IT systems are housed utilizing 340 square feet of data center space in a custom designed colocation cage, 20 MB of bandwidth and 50 kW of conditioned, system-diverse gradeconditioned power.

“We needed a colocation partner that could provide reliable, scalable power,” says Filandro. “Iron Mountain was able to get us moved and powered up in short order with no interruption in service.”

Since Meritage decided to move its IT systems to Iron Mountain, the company has seen a 30% reduction in its monthly data center costs.

Uptime has increased as well, resulting in improved productivity and operational effectiveness.

“Iron Mountain has executed flawlessly,” says Filandro. “They allow me to focus on my business. I don’t worry about the data center anymore and that lets me sleep a little easier at night.” "We were looking for a provider that was focused on providing enterprise-grade data center space, power and network access-Iron Mountain had it all."