Isle of Man Races to Hybrid Cloud

EMC Corporation announced that the British Isle
of Man Government‘s Information Systems Division has implemented a cloud-based
technology infrastructure for its public services, using EMC VPLEX technology and EMC Unified
Storage with solid-state flash drives.

  
     Location of Isle of Man (in red)

As part of
its IT transformation initiative, the Government’s entire public service
infrastructure has been moved onto a hybrid cloud service, providing shared
access-anywhere, including over 1,000 government applications such as
email, financial accounting, customer relationship management and health
services.

Customer
Benefits:

• Enhanced performance
  and reduced operating costs: Data availability and system performance has
  improved by eight times. Operating costs have fallen by 15 per cent
• Improved
  storage utilization: The usage of existing storage resources has been increased
  by 40 %, meaning that the disk pool will now only require an upgrade when it
  reaches 80% capacity,
  instead of the previous 60%
• Automatic
  storage optimization: VPLEX with Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST)
  automatically analyzes system usage patterns for improved operational
  efficiency
• Data
  transfer to fast-access storage: In-demand applications and data are
  automatically moved to flash drives for increased availability, then back onto
  fibre channel disk drives as demand reduces.

The Isle of Man has deployed a combination of the EMC VPLEX
virtual storage platform – a critical enabler for the journey to the cloud
which allows organizations to federate information across multiple data centers
and access it from anywhere – with EMC Unified Storage.

Peter
Clarke, Chief Technology Officer at the Isle of Man Government, said: "The Isle of Man
Government is an early adopter of new technologies, and our analysis indicated
that VPLEX would reduce operating costs by 15 %. We wrote our business plan
around this. It was a compelling argument. Having recognized that VPLEX could
further increase service levels while reducing IT costs, we made the decision to
purchase – and we are delighted to have realized the projected benefits, and
more."

"By virtualizing our entire server platform
and all service applications, the Isle of Man
Government has significantly increased service levels as well as data flexibility
and availability. In the case of the health service, this means individual
patient records are now aggregated and appropriate information made instantly
available to doctors, EMT specialists, ambulance technicians, surgeons, nurses
and other authorized users," added Clarke.

Demand for
the Isle of Man Government’s public service infrastructure varies regularly due
to factors such as tourism seasonality, shift work in government offices and
annual events such as the island’s famous TT motorcycle race. The Government’s
legacy system was disk-based and tiered in three layers. Previously, when
demand for certain applications and data increased, the Information Systems
Division would have to manually assign each to a higher tier level.

Now VPLEX
Metro, with FAST technology, analyses system
usage patterns and automatically moves in-demand applications to flash drives
for increased availability. As demand falls back, the relevant assets are moved
back onto FC disk drives.

Implemented
over five months, the new public service infrastructure has increased data
availability and system performance by a factor of eight, while operating costs
have reduced by 15 per cent. Storage utilization has risen by 40 % – using the
same amount of hardware as before – and capacity of the Government’s storage
area network has tripled. In addition, VPLEX has improved system flexibility by
allowing the Isle of Man Government to transfer services from one data center
to another in real time.