Faced with 100 per cent year-on-year data growth, the London council of Hillingdon’s IT team has decided to virtualise its servers.
With a population of almost a quarter of a million, Hillingdon is one of London’s largest local authorities.
It has responsibility for running schools, social services, waste collection and roads within the borough.
Now the council has created a sustainable IT environment by replacing its disparate array of servers and storage hardware with a greener virtual environment using Compellent and VMware.
It took the virtualisation decision after being faced with the rapid growth of employees’ e-mail boxes, the need to retain documents such as benefits assessments records, and the increased use of digital images in planning applications and property and highway inspections.
Roger Bearpark, assistant head of ICT for the Borough of Hillingdon, said they were looking for a new storage solution that could automatically manage data and drive down the cost per TB of stored data over the life of the SAN.
“It had to provide us with affordable system resilience and also contribute to a greener IT infrastructure,” he said.
Virtualising the servers with VMware and the storage with Compellent enabled Hillingdon to reduce 94 production servers to just three, and to reduce the number of server rooms it had from three to two.
The subsequent power reduction from 34kW to 1.1kW led directly to Hillingdon saving GBP £20,000 on its annual energy bill.
The green IT initiative enabled it to reduce its carbon footprint by 20 per cent over 18 months.
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