Phoenix Helps Derbyshire Council to Create Scalable Storage Infrastructure

Client Derbyshire
County Council works in partnership with nine district and borough
councils. It has in excess of 30,000 staff, serving a population of 750,000;
predicted to increase by 8% over the next 10 years.

Challenge ‘Achieve more for less.’
Tackle exponential
growth in storage generated by 8,000 network and ICT users, and a roll out of
an electronic document and records management system, converting legacy based
data to electronic records. Reduce backup overheads, improve time to failover
to DR site – all in an environment where costs must be controlled, existing SAN
investments utilised and IT services improved.

Solution Innovation in Technology
An on-premise
NetApp optimised storage solution: data tiering consolidated file data onto two
NetApp clusters across two sites using virtual technology; data protection and
DR failover through regular snapshots and thin replication; reduced storage usage
through Thin Provision, dedupe and compression. Phoenix IT Group PLC designed, supplied
and deployed the solution.

Benefits
Optimised tiering of storage, reduced
backup windows, enhanced DR Service levels, reduced and/or delayed IT
expenditure via right tiering of file storage on NetApp using storage techniques
which has placed control on existing and future data growth.

Derbyshire County Council delivers a range
of services covering children and adults, social care, highways, libraries and
culture and waste disposal. It has to provide these in the face of ever-tighter
budgets and increased scrutiny, with technology playing a key role in enabling
efficiency gains and improving operational effectiveness. Given the complexity
of its business, the council generates enormous volumes of data, which led to
problems.

"We’ve
seen massive growth," says Rob Skermer, data centre manager. "We first implemented our SAN  in 2003 and it was scaled for 2TB.
Today, for each environment, we’re looking at 250TB, so growth is more than a
hundredfold. Keeping pace is difficult."

By 2012, Derbyshire’s storage solution was
running out of capacity. It didn’t provide file services directly and required
many Windows servers to be connected to deliver the bandwidth and performance
to serve 8,000 users. Data replication and file server failover was complex and
often found to be unreliable. When backing up the file servers an entire
weekend was required due to the many millions of files, many never being
touched or changed. So whilst the platform met the needs of server
virtualisation and business applications, it failed to meet file serving
requirements and service levels associated with ensuring data is always
available and recoverable. With the majority of restores file-based, staff
spent several hours locating the right file, so the demands on staff were
significant.

A new strategy was required that enabled
the Council to retain existing SAN investments whilst deploying an enhanced
approach to file services that met user demands, improved service levels and
provided a sustainable and scalable platform going forward.

Why Phoenix
"Phoenix is a trusted partner, providing invaluable
consulting assistance," Skermer says. "We wanted a cost-effective, sustainable approach for the next 3-5
years, with minimum capital overheads."

Phoenix approaches such engagements in a consultative fashion. In the case
of Derbyshire, the council had a good storage array that excelled in some
functions and failed in others. The Phoenix
approach was to right-size the solution and implement functional storage
tiering – moving a large quantity of low IO file storage to a more optimised
NetApp unified storage platform, optimised for file services with storage
efficiencies and data protection capabilities: a better fit for its tier 2
storage.

Skermer says: "We have a good relationship with Phoenix
and confidence in its people, consulting and technical services. We also had a
tight time frame, which was built into the contract."

The council was about to exceed capacity
and wanted to avoid penalties within its existing contract, plus having to
spend capital on an interim solution.

"We
had to implement fast, over four weeks. We also wanted to free up storage, in
terms of unstructured data – and thanks to Phoenix we ultimately freed up 20TB of tier 1
storage."

The Phoenix solution
Using skills and disciplines including IT business requirements assessment, storage and Microsoft consultancy, and data migration, plus project management to complete on time and to budget, Phoenix implemented a
dual-site NetApp storage platform. This consolidated multiple file servers onto
a unified platform, using high capacity SATA drives and with storage efficiency
features including thin provision, data dedupe and compression. This enabled
the Council to ‘right tier’ its storage.

"Working
with Phoenix
enabled us to reduce the storage we had to provision and pay for,"
Skermer says.

NetApp Snapshot technology meant millions
of files could be backed up in seconds and retained for four weeks, with tape
used for long-term retention to meet governance requirements.

"We
have multiple restore points, so have improved performance in recovering files.
Before, it could take two days. Today, it takes seconds. We may have three or
four requests each day, so that overhead in person-hours reduced. NetApp
is also used to replicate data off-site to a secondary site. We’ve
enhanced failover, improving our resilience and recoverability options: using
NetApp we have failover in 10-15 minutes from one site to another and it’s
invisible to users," Skermer says.

ROI
"Our
solution’s modular so we can scale in terms of future capacity,"
Skermer adds. "With the NetApp
controllers, we can swap-out without any service interruption, attaching more
storage. So it’s sustainable: one of our original requirements."

Derbyshire could leverage existing
investments, delaying the cost of replacing its legacy platform whilst
providing a solution better suited to 8,000 users. Storage efficiencies reduced
storage outlay by up to 50%, while the backup window shrank from 48 hours to
seconds, with reduced tape handling improving service levels and reducing the
cost of IT operations. Greater IP LAN and WAN bandwidth has also been achieved
by using the NDMP.

"Our
relationship with Phoenix
has always been productive, no matter what project we’ve engaged on, in terms
of meeting our objectives and achieving the outcomes we wanted. It’s a 100%
record – including the hardware managed services we also currently receive. In
this case, Phoenix
again demonstrated a real commitment to developing a solution that’s highly
beneficial to us. Phoenix people understand
where we’re coming from and Phoenix
is very flexible. In terms of technology, I think we’re now at the forefront in
this area."