
SECTOR
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Local Government
CHALLENGE
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To guarantee continuous service delivery and the growing expectations of the borough’s residents.
SOLUTION
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StorSimple cloud-integrated storage.
BENEFITS
…………………………………………………………………… > Reduced support costs.
> Projected OPEX savings of £50k+.
> A move from reactive to proactive IT.
> Big data analysis.
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.
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.
Business benefits of Azure
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Big data analysis is now possible, allowing Brentwood to look for patterns in their system centre and identify newly emerging threats.