Case Study – Albury City Council

Albury City Council Turns to New Storage System to Support EDRMS and Virtualised Infrastructure

Business Overview

Albury City Council administers a local government area spanning some 313 square kilometres in the Riverina region of New South Wales with a total population of 44,000. The Mayor and eight councillors are supported by a general manager responsible for the day-to-day delivery of community and recreation, engineering, and planning and economic development services. The IT systems that support the council are managed from a single data centre while a disaster recovery environment is under consideration for funding in 2010–11.

Challenges

With the council planning to implement new systems in 2008–09, it needed to consolidate its existing disparate storage infrastructure. A plan to install a new electronic document and records management system (EDRMS) in particular gave impetus to plans to replace several isolated storage systems attached directly to leased servers with a centralised storage architecture.

The EDRMS – expected to be fully implemented by the end of 2010 – will enable council staff to edit a master copy of a document stored centrally rather than different versions of the same document stored in multiple locations, driving efficiencies and improving productivity.

“Our planning revealed we would need an extra 5TB of storage capacity to support our transition to the new EDRMS and projects such as virtualising our data centre infrastructure”, said Pauline Hammans, IT Supervisor, Albury City Council.

This additional capacity would enable the council to support the rollout of the new system with the existing network storage running in parallel until the process was completed. The council was also anxious to gain the ability to pool its storage resources and allocate them as required. In addition, a centralised system would allow the IT team to audit the performance and capabilities of its infrastructure and adopt a proactive approach to meeting the organisation’s requirements.

EMC Solution

In March 2009, Albury City Council requested quotes from a panel of integrators to consolidate its server fleet, install a dynamic, flexible data centre infrastructure and upgrade its storage.

“On the storage side, we undertook a comprehensive selection process that spanned pricing, reputation, reliability and technical superiority, including the possibility of installing solid state drives to improve performance and reduce environmental impact”, said Hammans.

“We also considered whether we should purchase a storage platform from a supplier that also provides servers and other data centre hardware or from a supplier that specialises in storage and data management. Because we wanted the flexibility to potentially go to market in future for new servers rather than be tied to a particular vendor’s products, we chose the latter path.”

Already aware of EMC’s reputation for performance and professionalism, the council confirmed its views with two other local government authorities that had installed the vendor’s products. It then selected EMC partner Thomas Duryea Consulting to implement a solution incorporating Sun server hardware, an EMC storage array and VMware vSphere 4 virtualisation technologies.

Albury City Council is now running a range of applications using 40 virtual machines on a cluster of five Sun Fire x4150 servers with dual fibre-channel links to an EMC CLARiiON CX4-120 with nine 1 TB SATA disks, twenty-one 300 GB fibre channel hard drives and five 73 GB solid state drives. These applications include the EDMS, antivirus, Microsoft System Center, three Microsoft SQL database servers, domain name servers, Web servers, file and print servers and a Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 email system. An Oracle financial management system is due to be migrated to the new infrastructure by mid-2010.

The five host servers have replaced twenty-one physical machines, many of which were running more than one application. The virtual machines are also running new systems such as security camera monitoring and childcare administration management software. One of the servers remains inactive under the management of VMware’s High Availability software until required.

“Thomas Duryea Consulting undertook the design, build and implementation of the new system, which was a very smooth procedure”, said Hammans.

“The documentation was very good and the equipment was ordered and delivered in a timely manner. The consultants also interacted closely with our technical team here and ensured they had the necessary skills to maintain and upgrade the new system.”

Once Thomas Duryea Consulting finalised the implementation, the council’s internal technical team migrated the twenty-one servers across at the earliest opportunity.

The council is one of the first EMC customers in Australia to install solid state drives, which deliver improved performance and sustainability. By using flash memory to store and retrieve data, the drives offer better performance than the market’s fastest hard disk drives and require considerably less power to run.

“We are using the solid state drives to improve the speed and performance of our databases”, said Hammans. “To do this, we are placing our transaction logs, archive logs and redo logs on the drives to improve log switching and speed of access to the database system files. We are also putting data files that have high I/O on these state drives to improve performance.”

The fibre channel hard drives are combined with a high-performance RAID array used to provide faster and more resilient storage for database data files and VMware guest machine operating systems, while the SATA disks provide slower but still reliable recovery for ordinary data files such as documents, mail files, archived documents and architectural plans.

Albury City Council is also considering deploying EMC’s Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) to lower total cost of ownership, improve return on investment and ensure the right service level is automatically allocated to data to minimise cost.

Virtualisation Supported by Centralised EMC Storage Saves Real Estate and Power

The new infrastructure has allowed the council to reduce its rack space requirements from two full racks to half a rack in total, freeing up data centre real estate for future expansion. The reduced server hardware required has also lowered data centre power and cooling requirements considerably.

“Deploying VMware vSphere 4 with a single management console has also enabled us to run all our servers from one place and view how much storage we have left available to allocate to applications”, said Hammans. “This ability to generate statistics and graphs allows us to pinpoint trends and supports the IT team’s mission to adopt a more proactive approach to ensuring the council carries out its duties.”

The new system has also delivered 100% availability, building the council’s confidence in its business continuity capabilities and providing a platform to support growth.

Summary

With a new EDRMS providing the impetus, Albury City Council decided to implement a new centralised storage architecture and virtualised server environment. The council, which manages an area spanning 313 square kilometres in the Riverina region of New South Wales, has implemented a solution based on EMC and VMware technologies. This has enabled it to consolidate and manage storage and servers centrally, providing a more responsive service to the business.