Brentwood Borough Council – StorSimple

Brentwood Borough Council moves to the Cloud

SECTOR
……………………………………………………………………
Local Government

CHALLENGE
……………………………………………………………………
To guarantee continuous service delivery and the growing expectations of the borough’s residents.

SOLUTION
……………………………………………………………………
StorSimple cloud-integrated storage.

BENEFITS
…………………………………………………………………… > Reduced support costs.
> Projected OPEX savings of £50k+.
> A move from reactive to proactive IT.
> Big data analysis.

Better backup, more storage, less cost for

local government thanks to Azure

Azure has helped us to shed the ageing technology we previously used and it has given us all the benefits of a modern data centre. By breaking the cycle of implementing new equipment only to replace it three years down the line, we have become increasingly more agile and scalable.

Phil Ruck, Chief Executive at Brentwood Borough Council

We use the term ‘high availability by design’. Other organisations have to spend a lot of money to achieve this, but we can build into Azure and have a very highly-available infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of doing it ourselves.

Tim Huggins, ICT Manager at Brentwood Borough Council

Brentwood wanted to improve its desktop experience, sort out capacity management and modernise when we met them. This was coming from a desire to embrace the cloud and the technology. The local authority was at a tipping point from a cost and capability angle.

Paul Collins, Head of Cloud and Infrastructure Services at Sol-Tec

Brentwood Borough Council is a local authority that needed to meet the demands of its residents with technology that was increasingly showing its age. Their IT team tried to be economical and efficient, but disaster recovery testing showed that they needed help to ensure smooth and continuous service delivery.

Sweating their assets
In early 2015, Brentwood Borough Council had a decision to make; they could continue to sweat their current assets or they could implement new hardware. The former would save them money, but it would increase the risk of problems in the long run, especially when manufacturers’ warranties expired.

“People want a self-service, 24/7 operation, but how do you provide a service like that with a small team?” says Tim Huggins, ICT Manager at Brentwood.

In an era of transformation and growing expectations, Brentwood Council needed a new approach to its IT.

High availability by design

Then they came across StorSimple, a provider of cloud-integrated storage that Microsoft acquired to become part of Azure’s cloud storage solution. They approached Microsoft who put them in touch with Sol-Tec Ltd.

The solution
Sol-Tec set up StorSimple, which uses an on-premise SAN linked to a new Hyper-V environment. This gave Brentwood the capability to use other Microsoft technology and build a hybrid data centre.

Brentwood used an HP 4000 SAN platform that provided storage for all their VMware server estate. As part of the wider initiative, they migrated VMware to Hyper-V. “We already had an HP SAN ourselves so we knew the technology well,” says Paul Collins. “We knew the challenges of moving to something new which is why we started with this migration.”

By creating a back up around the SAN, Brentwood has improved disaster recovery and the ability to manage data growth using the storage platform.

Business benefits of Azure

By choosing Azure, Brentwood quickly saw many benefits. In particular:

Reduced support costs for hardware and by reducing their data centre footprint. Before, Brentwood had eight shelves in their data centre and another six to eight at their disaster recovery site. With Azure, they were able to reduce this down to two shelves at the data centre and close down their disaster recovery site completely.
Projected OPEX savings during the first stage of this transition are close to £50,000. Total estimated one – off CAPEX savings are close to £90,000.
A move from reactive to proactive IT means that Brentwood’s IT team is now the first to know about a potential issue, without hearing about it first when a user complains.
Big data analysis is now possible, allowing Brentwood to look for patterns in their system centre and identify newly emerging threats.

Phil Ruck, Chief Executive at Brentwood Borough Council

Tim Huggins, ICT Manager at Brentwood Borough Council

Paul Collins, Head of Cloud and Infrastructure Services at Sol-Tec

Further Reading

Do you have a project you'd like to discuss?