Columbia County builds a scalable modular data center to improve availability, doubling IT capacity while leaving the same energy footprint.

Columbia County builds a scalable modular data center to improve availability, doubling IT capacity while leaving the same energy footprint.

Overview

Challenge

An aging infrastructure threatens a U.S. county’s ability to scale for growth and meet an increasing demand for Web services

Solution
It engages IBM for assessment, design and building of a scalable modular data center

Key Benefits
• Improves data center availability by offering 24x7 Web services
• Roughly doubles IT capacity with practically no increase in energy consumption
• Saves US$30,000 annually, having fewer servers to maintain

A booming county
One of the fastest-growing counties in Georgia, Columbia County (www.columbiacountyga.gov) is in the second-largest metropolitan area in the state. Attracting professionals with its convenient commute to Augusta, the region is home to more than 110,000 citizens. The county attributes its rapid growth to its diversified employment opportunities, premier school system, affordable housing and stable local government.

To accommodate its growing population, Columbia County wanted to offer its citizens more self-service conveniences for paying bills, registering business licenses and conducting other activities. By offering more
services via the Web, citizens could perform tasks online whenever and wherever they wanted, while reducing costs for the county.

Serving a growing population by providing 24x7 Web services
A greater collection of Web services demands a greater IT infrastructure. But Columbia County’s existing data center wouldn’t cut it. Its equipment was aging and lacked redundancy, creating reliability issues: “We had been experiencing several outages—three or four a year, with some lasting 12 hours—due to inadequate power and cooling systems. It was impacting the Web services available to our citizens, so we needed to fix that problem quickly,” said Lewis Foster, Columbia County’s chief information officer.

What’s more, the county’s existing systems outgrew its 600-square-foot server room, and the data center lacked floor space to scale for growth. The room’s narrow design, inconveniently placed support columns and poorly situated doors limited the available floor space. Moreover, the data center had been relying on an outdated uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and highly inefficient humidifier and computer room air-conditioning systems that wasted energy and were unable to properly support the current infrastructure.

Columbia County needed to grow and expand its IT architecture to better support heavier online traffic and day-today IT operations. It required a more powerful, scalable and flexible infrastructure but needed to heed government budgets and conservatively spend taxpayer dollars. Above all, Columbia County wanted to eliminate unexpected downtime, minimize power consumption and increase capacity to accommodate future growth.

Next-generation solution to improve availability and flexibility
Over 18 months, Columbia County renovated its data center with a scalable modular data center solution from IBM, featuring InfraStruXure architecture from American Power Conversion (APC), and virtualized IBM BladeCenter® servers. Because the county needed to quickly reduce outages to improve the quality of its services, IBM acted to accelerate the evaluation, design, approval and implementation processes.

With its scalable modular data center, Columbia County can now support—and expand to continue to support — its growing population. It can offer more Web services and provide higher availability thanks to a much more powerful and redundant IT infrastructure. The county grew the capacity of its IT infrastructure by nearly 200 percent while increasing its energy consumption by only 7 percent. But even with the slight increase in energy usage, Columbia County is still saving an estimated US$30,000 annually with the new solution, as a result of reduced server hardware maintenance costs.

The idea for the renovation began in 2007, when Columbia County visited the IBM Raleigh customer briefing center and learned of the scalable modular data center. It contracted IBM Global Technology Services to perform a high-level assessment of its facility. As part of a site and facilities services contract, the IBM team evaluated the IT environment, compiled its findings and drafted a statement of requirements that outlined a proposed IT data center—designed to accommodate the next five to seven years of growth and improve availability to help the client meet business objectives. “IBM has the experience to bring the flexibility of the modular design to life and to support our growth with a redundant solution,” says Foster.

The IBM Global Technology Services team initiated a three-phase, nominal disruption migration to update the IT infrastructure and provided project management for the design and build teams. Foster says, “With IBM as the project manager, the team outlined expectations, kept us informed of the progress and acted as a partner. With all the individual projects and subcontractors to manage, we couldn’t have done it without IBM.”

“With IBM as the project manager, the team outlined expectations, kept us informed of the progress and acted as a partner. With all the individual projects and subcontractors to manage, we couldn’t have done it without IBM.” - Lewis Foster, chief information officer, Columbia County

Best-in-class equipment for a solid foundation
To provide a predictable cooling environment in the new data center, the layout is based on hot and cold aisle configurations. APC ACRP101 in-row cooling units focus air directly on network hardware instead of controlling the ambient temperature. This method shortens the air path,
thereby requiring less fan power. Also, warm exhaust air is drawn from the hot aisle, cooled and distributed into the cold aisle to help ensure that the equipment inlet temperature is adequate for operation and to prevent hot air from circulating through sensitive IT equipment. Redundant in-row cooling units allow for routine maintenance and reduce potential data center outages.

Additionally, IBM deployed a pair of APC UPS systems, which provide N+1 redundancy. These larger-capacity units allow for routine maintenance with nominal downtime and reduce potential outages. To support the UPS units and cooling systems, IBM also implemented a highly efficient generator, which increases availability by monitoring its own status, run times and fluid levels. And IBM installed security and environmental monitoring equipment to manage and monitor alarm systems. The equipment tracks temperature, humidity, water levels, UPS battery capacity, generator status and fuel levels. It also records people entering the data center.

To house the network and server equipment, IBM installed a series of modular equipment racks, which have a smaller footprint compared with that of a traditional cabinet. The more compact layout lets the client maintain a larger network infrastructure in a smaller floor space. Internal rack cable management helps eliminate cable stress and maintains a neat and organized cable layout.

Doubled IT capacity to support business growth
Implementing the new scalable modular data center provided the county with the perfect opportunity to update its IT infrastructure. IBM worked with IBM Business Partner Mainline Information Systems to install new IBM System x® and IBM BladeCenter servers. The multicore chips and high-efficiency power supplies of the new servers reduce power consumption. Power management software helps Columbia County increase reliability and uptime by reducing stress on data center power and cooling systems.

Columbia County also leveraged VMware software to virtualize 35 servers onto just three physical servers. In addition to reducing power consumption and maintenance costs, virtualization minimizes service disruptions from planned hardware downtime by shifting virtual servers among physical machines with no disruption. It also allows the county to provision new servers to support application growth in less time.

Future plans call for IBM to reduce power consumption for each physical server and to throttle back energy during weekends and other slow times.

Growth, availability and energy savings for citizens
Columbia County benefits greatly from the advantages of the scalable modular data center solution. Highly available Thanks to its built-in redundancy, the solution helps eliminate power and cooling outages and reduce voice and data network outages. In addition, the redundant design of the power and cooling systems will help improve overall system availability, minimizing planned and unplanned outages. Larger and scalable The scalable modular data center solution enabled the county to nearly double the size of its IT operations and to quadruple its floor space. Its infrastructure grew from six to eight data and communication racks, from one to two UPS units and from one to four cooling systems. In addition, the county increased its power capacity by more than 500 percent and its cooling capacity by more than 300 percent, enabling the quick addition of IT equipment and associated power, cooling and racks, with minimum disruption to operations.

Cost efficient
By reducing the number of servers in the data center by more than 90 percent through virtualization, Columbia County will reduce energy and operational costs. The client estimates that it will save US$30,000 annually on server hardware maintenance alone.

Sustainable
Moreover, with fewer machines to power because of the virtualized environment, the county is reducing its carbon emissions and moving toward more sustainable operation. Further, the more efficient power and cooling systems use fewer resources, further cutting emissions, while offering sufficient capacity to accommodate the county’s existing and future IT requirements.

Experience second to none
By working with IBM, the county was able to quickly update its infrastructure. IBM Global Technology Services managed the project and coordinated contractors to keep the data center operational, with minimum scheduled downtime. Columbia County appreciated IBM’s leadership and commitment to delivering a high-quality solution. “IBM did a great job managing the entire project. They were always there for us, and we truly felt like they wanted us to succeed,” says Foster.

And, since the launch, the data center’s power and cooling systems have had no unexpected outages. “We have nothing but praise for IBM. The solution exceeded all our expectations,” says Lewis.

For more information
To learn more about the scalable modular data center solution from IBM, contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit: ibm.com/services/siteandfacilities