London Borough of Hillingdon: Council cuts costs and energy use through virtualization
The Dell Compellent Storage Center storage array topped the list in each category: ease of management, total cost of ownership, excellent environmental credentials and good disaster recovery capabilities.
Roger Bearpark, Assistant Head of ICT, London Borough of Hillingdon
With a population of almost 250,000, the London Borough of Hillingdon is one of London’s largest local authorities. It is responsible for running schools, social services, waste collection and roads within the borough.
The London Borough of Hillingdon’s IT team faced nearly 100 per cent yearon- year data growth. This was driven mainly by a greater volume of email traffic, expanding document retention requirement, and the increase of digital images in planning applications as well as property and highway inspections. Its existing five-year-old storage array couldn’t accommodate this level of data growth or support the IT team, which struggled to prioritise and manage the borough’s needs manually.
As the legacy storage solution approached capacity, the cost of management increased along with power consumption. The borough’s budget was stretched to its limit. On top of this, the IT team’s only disaster recovery plan was to hold backup tapes offsite.
Roger Bearpark, Assistant Head of ICT for the London Borough of Hillingdon, says: “We looked for a new storage solution that could automatically manage data and drive down the cost per terabyte of stored data over the life cycle of the storage array. It had to provide us with affordable system resilience and also contribute to a greener IT infrastructure.”
“We looked at all the main providers. In the end, the decision wasn’t difficult,” says Bearpark. “The Dell Compellent Storage Center storage array topped the list in each category: ease of management, total cost of ownership, excellent environmental credentials and good disaster recovery capabilities.”
As a result, the London Borough of Hillingdon made the decision to install two 30-terabyte Dell Compellent Storage Center storage arrays with Dell Fluid Data technology. One storage array is at the main site and the other is located five miles away as part of a business continuity solution.
Borough reduces power consumption by around 80 per cent a year
The London Borough of Hillingdon faced a problem common among many organisations. Although it was storing many terabytes of data, only 10 per cent was considered missioncritical at any given time. But the other 90 per cent couldn’t be moved to offline storage because it might be required at short notice.
Adding to this problem was the fact that the existing storage array couldn’t automatically distinguish between primary and secondary data. This meant the IT team had to either spend time manually moving data or leave secondary data on expensive, high-speed disks.
By contrast, Dell Compellent Data Progression delivers fully automated tiered storage. It cuts administrative time and reduces overall storage costs by automatically moving infrequently accessed data from high-performance Fibre-Channel disks to less expensive, high-capacity Serial Attached SCSI storage, which accounts for 210 terabytes or 92 per cent of the company’s primary storage capacity. “We calculated that in the next year the Dell Compellent Storage Center storage array solution will save us £65,000 in staff costs through automated tiering, and £26,000 in savings by avoiding the use of more expensive Fibre-Channel disks,” says Bearpark.
These efficiencies are enhanced by Dell Compellent Dynamic Capacity thin-provisioning software, which eliminates the allocated but unused capacity found in traditional storage arrays. This means the London Borough of Hillingdon can defer storage upgrades and no longer needs to buy storage hardware upfront. It also saves on floor space and electricity costs associated with keeping unused disks spinning. Bearpark estimates that by using energy-efficient SATA disks the school uses around 80 per cent less power annually. “This has enabled us to make a significant contribution towards the council’s performance in relation to the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) Energy Efficiency Scheme. This energy reduction produces further savings in helping the council avoid the purchase of credits to offset our emissions,” he says.
Solution delivers excellent return on investment
While storage has increased from 30 to 245 terabytes over the last four years, the overall cost of storage has decreased by around 70 per cent. The use of solid-state drives has provided a significant return on investment for the borough. “Data is handled at the block level and so we don’t need to allocate entire trays of disks to just one application. To use our CRM system as an example, we’ve gained a 13- fold improvement in performance for an investment of only £600,” says Bearpark. Additionally, the London Borough of Hillingdon had previously been faced with hiring extra personnel to deal with growing, complex and time-consuming data management tasks. However, because the Dell Compellent Storage Center storage array is so easy to use, and so many tasks have been automated, the London Borough of Hillingdon was able to save the borough a further £65,000 a year in additional salaries.
Agile platform scales quickly and easily
The ability to increase storage capacity without having to replace hardware is another major benefit the London Borough of Hillingdon has found with the Dell Compellent Storage Center storage array solution. “This is the first time in my career that I have ever seen such a long commitment with one partner that did not involve largescale upgrades along the way,” says Bearpark. Dell Compellent Storage Center storage array software tools also support his team to manage and expand storage at short notice. For example, with thin provisioning, the IT team can allocate storage space but only consume physical capacity when required, which avoids downtime.