The Need

Lancaster City Council Technical Support Team manages and supports 40 servers, which are a mixture of Solaris and Windows 2000, and provides second line support for its 700 PC users.

Over the years, Lancaster City Council had upgraded its servers - particularly filestore and email servers - a number of times to cope with the growing demand for data storage, which was increasing annually at 30 per cent. This was due to increased use of email and storage of documents on-line. Currently, the City Council stores around 1.5 terabytes of data in total.

“Lancaster City Council’s five filestore servers were all heading towards maximum capacity and were rapidly approaching end of life. Our Microsoft Exchange database was growing at an alarming rate,” comments Frank Keeling, Senior Systems Support Specialist at the Council who runs the technical support team within Information Services.

The Council’s Technical Support team also felt that its network back-up solution needed reviewing. “It had performed well for many years, but with the relentless increase in data, was beginning to struggle to contain our backup cycle within the time windows available,” states Frank Keeling.

The Council decided to look for a solution that would solve its immediate problems with storage and back-up, so preventing another round of expensive upgrades and server replacements. At the same time, it wanted a more cost-effective solution to cope with projected data storage requirements for the next five years.

The B2net Solution

Lancaster City Council turned to leading storage integrator B2net to review its storage and back-up requirements.

“We already had a good relationship with B2net, as they had supplied us with some Unix servers and we had maintenance support agreements with them. We also looked at proposals from two other suppliers, but we chose B2net's solution because it was the most cost effective, and the one that best met our requirements. B2net was always quick to answer any questions we had along the way,” says Frank Keeling.

The B2net proposal included a Network Appliance FAS270 Data Store, with 3TB raw storage running NetApp Data on Tap software, an Overland REO Serial ATA disk unit, an Overland NEO LT02 Tape Library with Bakbone NetVault back-up software.

The NetApp storage solution was implemented and went live in a matter of weeks. “B2net gave us excellent support throughout the process,” adds Keeling.

The Benefits

“The Council has achieved the benefits we expected from the storage upgrade and much more. We now have no problems in accommodating the Council's current and projected data storage requirements. This is increasingly important as the number of staff joining the Council is growing and the demand for data shows no signs of abating,” comments Frank Keeling.

“There is no need to purchase additional or replacement servers for increased storage space requirements. When we purchase additional or replacement servers for other reasons, they are less expensive because they need less local disk space, because we can utilise the data store.”

The Council has no problems in containing its back-ups well within the time available. This is especially important as the Council has just introduced a flexible working scheme that increases the time that staff can work, thereby reducing the time available for back-ups. It also saves time for its users by doing faster restores either from tape or by utilising the Netapp Snapshot Restore facility.

The B2net solution has given the council advanced functionality through better data management tools. This provides the IT team with more strategic tools to identify trends and data usage requirements. It means the IT support staff save on out of hours work because much more maintenance can be done ‘on-the-fly’.

The Future

The introduction of an advanced storage solution has enabled Lancaster City Council to save money, centralise its infrastructure and meet future data growth paths. The NetApp solution also provides the platform to address the need for improved data compliance within local government to meet new legislation.

The Council is looking to make more effective use of its servers by introducing new facilities, such as Virtual Server technology.