Rossendale IT infrastructure to deliver predicted cost savings of £352,000

Rossendale Borough Council provides services to around 60,000 people in Lancashire, and like other local government offices has recently come under considerable pressure to reduce its operational costs.

With IT infrastructure targetted for expenditure cuts at both central and local government level, the council earlier this year consolidated its server and data centre capacity with the help of Manchester based systems integrator ANS Group.

“The prime driver was total cost of ownership (TCO) realisation and a reduction in our asset base, both in terms of server hardware and software licensing. We were also keen to cut the number of vendors we were using,” said Rossendale head of infrastructure services and IT Andrew Buckle.

“We had inherited a mixture of legacy servers, mostly Dell and Compaq [now HP] going back nine years or more. Some still has support agreements, some did not, and we found that purchasing additional support was very expensive.”

Rossendale was also keen to cut its carbon footprint by reducing its power consumption. Recent research from Gartner suggests that a typical x86 server consumes 60 to 70 per cent of its total power when running at low utilisation levels, with many organisations averaging only 7-15 per cent utilisation of physical servers.
The council has reduced the number of physical servers in its data centre from 42 to three, using VMWare’s vSphere server virtualisation platform (formerly VMWare Infrastructure) to host virtual servers accessed via the internet.

Part of the data-centre consolidation also saw the implementation of a storage area network (SAN) using NetApp storage arrays to host 35TB of centralised data and virtual machines (VMs). Rossendale also adopted a more efficient hosted pay per use storage model for its backup and disaster recovery purposes.

“We pay for what we store rather than follow the traditional disaster recovery model in which you bring your own servers to the remote site,” said Buckle. “That way, we pay a variable cost and use data de-duplication technology to reduce the volume of data we have to store.”

Buckle estimates the whole project has saved the council £70,000 so far. Total savings are expected to reach £352,000 in the future because of money that would otherwise have had to be spent on replacing and upgrading physical replacement hardware and maintaining the previous disaster recovery strategy.

“As soon as we switched off the physical servers we saw savings on power straight away,” said Buckle. “And having virtual servers at our disaster recovery site means we can utilise revenue we would have been using to pay for equipment in better ways too.”

Rather than scrapping its old servers, the council recycled them by selling them on and using the funds to pay for the vSphere upgrade.

Future upgrade plans include replacing Rossendale’s current local area network (LAN) switching infrastructure with gigabit Ethernet equipment, and implementing Microsoft SharePoint to help with information management and data retention.

Some organisations have reported performance problems running certain applications on virtual servers, but Buckle says these have not materialised at Rossendale as yet.

“Some people are running Oracle 10G but we haven’t noticed any performance degradation whatsoever – in fact it has probably increased,” he said.

“The same is true for SQL Server and Exchange 2007, though we are going to 2010 in the near future.”

“The project shows that councils can take an investment decision and see paybacks very quickly, not over seven or eight years,” said Buckle.

“Many local government organisations struggle with the concept [of virtualisation and consolidation] and have to see physical evidence from somebody else who has done in first.”