The Department of Education & Skills choose Origina to

implement Consolidated Backup & Disaster Recovery

Solution

Introduction:

Origina facilitated the Department of Education & Skills in the complete refresh and consolidation of their main production, test & development environment in a deal that saw them invest over €800,000 in a world class IT infrastructure. This project won the ICT Public Sector Project of the Year 2008.

Project Summary:

The department runs some of the largest databases in the country in an Oracle environment that consisted of a combination of legacy IBM pSeries and RS 6000 servers. This infrastructure was in a very distributed layout in that each server had its own designated direct attached storage & tape backup unit. As their needs grew this infrastructure model became highly inefficient. It was also very costly to power and maintain and did not adequately support their test and development requirements.

The Challenges / Issues:

Their requirements included the need to manage their data in a more efficient & secure manner and to be more dynamically able to utilise their Oracle development team. As part of their test and development environment they required greater levels of storage to enable them to take snapshots of their data at any given time.

The department needed a new infrastructure design that could grow with their needs into the future. Further to this, they needed to partner with a company that could offer a "teaming" solution that would deliver comprehensive telephone / email and onsite support as well as assistance in the day-to-day administration of the environment which included technologies new to the department such as SAN, Enterprise Consolidated Backup, Logical and Virtual Partitioning.

The Solution:

To fully meet their needs Origina carried out a full analysis of the environment and by working closely with the departments’ IT team provided a tailored solution around four key areas:

Server Solution

A full refresh of the server environment was completed using 12 x IBM UNIX servers using logical & virtual partitioning which allows the department to run multiple independent servers on a single physical server. Had they chosen to run their operations on physical servers alone, the end requirement would have been in excess of thirty servers. This would have resulted in a huge increase in power and data centre overheads, not to mention the massive software licensing overhead that would have been incurred on software such as Oracle which is licensed per processor.

Centralised Storage

The department implemented a new SAN infrastructure that included two IBM DS4700 units, one designated for test & development and one for their production needs. Origina have set this up in a manner which allows them to take multiple snapshots of production data from the production SAN and move them into the test & development area very quickly – a key requirement of the department’s Oracle team.

Consolidated Backup & Disaster Recovery

Because they were moving to a centralised storage infrastructure with a much greater volume of test & development, data backup and archiving was always going to be a key component of the project. Origina provided a solution that consisted of an IBM Enterprise tape library on the primary site and a smaller backup library on the Disaster Recovery site. The backup & archiving is controlled using IBM Tivoli Storage Manager software which is specifically configured to handle large volumes of Oracle data used by the department in the event of a Disaster, can be used to get back up and running in the DR site in a matter of hours.

Support and Teaming

The new environment is supported by Origina through a dedicated help desk that enables staff from the department to gain access to a dedicated team giving immediate assistance in relation to all specific queries on the environment. Origina also provide a dedicated monitoring service whereby a number of times per week their complete environment is scrutinised for current or upcoming issues such as problems with database sizes, problems with disk space, firmware upgrades etc. This dedicated support further enables the department to streamline their in-house operations and allows them integrate and use leading edge technologies.

The Business Benefits:

The benefits of this solution are numerous and can be examined across three categories; Technical, Commercial and Environmental.

Technical

This project gives the Department of Education & Skills a world class, base infrastructure that is highly resilient, scalable and upgradeable into the future. The server and storage consolidation mean that the environment is easier to administer and manage going forward. The department also benefits from the fact that the entire environment is being supported and monitored on a daily basis by Origina's team of highly skilled consultants under an "Origina Teaming Contract".

Commercial

By using IBM’s logical and virtual partitioning the department has been able to dramatically reduce its requirement for enterprise software licenses such as Oracle, delivering savings that run to six figures. Also, the costs incurred in their data centre floor space and the electricity costs of powering many servers have also been dramatically reduced and these savings will continue to grow year on year.

Environmental

Owing to the benefits of both consolidation and virtualisation, this new infrastructure solution means that the department did not need to increase its hardware footprint and therefore there has been no negative environmental impact. Obviously the savings in powering and cooling the infrastructure mentioned above are having, and will continue to have a major, positive impact from a green perspective.

The server and storage consolidation mean that the environment is easier to administer and manage going forward. Also, the costs incurred in Data Centre floor space and the electricity costs of powering many servers have also been dramatically reduced.

The department also benefits from the fact that the entire environment is being supported and monitored on a daily basis by Origina's team of highly skilled consultants.

Why choose Origina?

"The consolidation of their server environment has made The Dept.’s IT infrastructure dramatically more streamlined and cost efficient. The increasing demands on the Department’s IT division through their growing need for a test and development capacity and overall wider storage needs was in the long-run always going to pose a problem. The tailored solution developed by Origina now gives them a fully refreshed, scalable storage environment that can adapt as their demands change into the future.”

Tomás O'Leary
Managing Director
Origina

Click here to see our full list of IT solution case studies