Bromley Sharpen System with Blades!

XMA has just set up a new state of the art server and storage solution for the London Borough of Bromley council, which is helping to ensure that it can provide a reliable, fast and secure ICT service to all of its staff.

The council had reached the stage where their systems were becoming unwieldy and unreliable and the ICT team were having to 'bolt on' servers to run an increasing number of applications and store ever more data.

Staff also had to change the back up tapes on a daily basis, which was very time consuming and in addition, there were numerous different email servers, serving the various departments. Due to the unwieldy nature of the system, these were becoming unreliable and this prompted a decision to be taken to review all of the ICT systems.

Microsoft worked with the council to develop a solution and after a competitive tendering process, XMA was chosen to implement the technology.

XMA replaced the old servers with 2 new HP Blade server racks. The Blade system enables servers and other storage devices to be managed from one console saving time and resources. It also saves considerable space and allows for future scalability, therefore minimising the risk of obsolescence.

In addition, a new HP Enterprise Virtual Array 5000 storage solution was also installed. The EVA 5000 is equipped with 40 terabytes of storage and it also has fibre channel disk drives, which operate at up to 2gb per second, dramatically speeding up the rate of data transfer, resulting in a much faster system.

Stuart Elsey, the Infrastructure Consultant at Bromley believes that the new system is already making a big difference to the Council. "The servers have been consolidated and are much easier to manage now," said Stuart "the whole system is also far more reliable than it used to be."

"The old servers were really struggling under the weight of all the applications and data that they were managing and it had really reached the stage where we desperately needed to completely overhaul everything. XMA have been extremely supportive, providing advice about the best products to use. They have worked with us in the past and with a number of other councils, so I know that they have a lot of experience in this area. I am confident that we have a solution that will meet our needs for the foreseeable future."

XMA's Account Manager for the project - Karl Buckle, believes that with the rapid growth in the amount of data required by councils, more of them need to seriously look at their storage needs. "Over the last few years, councils have had to cope with ever increasing demands on their ICT systems, with the majority of people needing access to email, the Internet and a number of new applications. In addition, they now have to meet the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act, where documents need to be made available to members of the public that request them.”

"With the new technologies that have been developed recently, such as Blade servers and fibre based 'virtual' storage solutions, I think that it is the perfect time for councils to review their requirements."