David Weekley Homes Case Study

Business Overview

David Weekley Homes is the largest privately-owned home builder in America. Since it was founded in Houston, Texas in 1976, the company has expanded to operate in 20 markets across the US, offering everything from custom designs for single lot builds to masterplanned communities. David Weekley Homes was the first builder in the US to be awarded the Triple Crown of American Home Building, an honor which includes “America’s Best Builder”, “National Housing Quality Award”, and two-time recipient of the “National Builder of the Year” honor.

IT Challenge

David Weekley Homes had two issues with the colocated IT environment they operated out of a data center in Houston, Texas: (1) with an in-house IT staff capable of handling much of their day-to-day IT functions, the fully managed solution they were contracted for was largely under-utilized, causing a greater expense than necessary, and (2) the location of their business and IT environment near the gulf coast presented availability and uptime concerns should this hurricane-prone region be impacted by a disaster.

Due to these concerns, David Weekley Homes was looking for a data center partner located in a geographically stable region that could serve as an extension of their IT department. They were seeking the expertise and flexibility to perform higher level tasks, like virtualization and backups. They did, however, want to maintain control over their environment with hands-on support delivered in a structured format to provide the most cost-effective means to run their operation.

Solutions

Utilizing a hybrid solution that blended colocation and cloud services, including managed storage and backups, LightEdge was able to meet their needs for a flexible and highly secure environment. Where David Weekley Homes’ previous provider would only allow for scheduled blocks of maintenance and minimal hands-on support, LightEdge was willing to work cooperatively with their IT staff to meets.

LightEdge’s data center services are all backed by 24/7/365 support from onsite engineers with the expertise and capability to support customers all the way through the application layer. If issues arise, David Weekley Homes simply submits a support ticket or picks up the phone to talk to a member of LightEdge’s Network Operation Center (NOC) Staff and the problem is immediately addressed.

“The flexibility LightEdge offers is unparalleled. Able to be our remote hands for routine maintenance and one-off occurrences, we have developed a relationship where LightEdge is an extension of our IT department,” stated Technology Manager, Richard Clark. “This is easily demonstrated in our use of EMC’s Avamar deduplication backup software. This critical piece of our business continuity plan is maintained jointly. My team handles a portion of the backup process alongside LightEdge’s managed offsite backups. The end result of this interaction provides complete control of our own IT environment and the methods employed to keep our data safe and secure.”

Aside from their excellent support, the location of LightEdge’s facilities and proven design played a major role in David Weekley Homes’ decision to partner with LightEdge. Unlike businesses along the coasts, LightEdge’s data centers are far less likely to be impacted by severe weather-related issues. For similar reasons, hundreds of customers look to LightEdge to serve as either their primary data storage site or secondary site for disaster recovery purposes. With redundancies built into its power and cooling systems, and with multiple Tier I backbone providers, each LightEdge facility is capable of keeping a business’s online operations up and running 24/7, even in the event of a disaster.

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