Published on 26-Sep-2006
Validated on 05 Dec 2008
"We wanted a system that we could consolidate multiple workloads on with confidence, so the IBM x3950 8-way servers were a natural choice for us. We got the uptime, resilience and growth potential that we were looking for." - Simon Lawrence, senior corporate analyst, West Berkshire Council
Customer:
West Berkshire Council
Industry:
Government
Deployment country:
United Kingdom
Solution:
Virtualization
IBM Business Partner:
Q Associates Ltd, Citrix Systems
Overview
Education, social services, highways, benefits, libraries and accountancy—these are just a handful of the services West Berkshire Council provides to the citizens of Berkshire, a rural area located west of London. Behind the scenes lies a huge IT infrastructure, including systems, network, backup and server storage, supporting these services for the district’s almost 150,000 residents. Pulling it all together is Simon Lawrence, the Council’s senior corporate support analyst.
Business need:
West Berkshire Council needed to reclaim data center space and resources, as well as to position the organization for dynamic growth.
Solution:
West Berkshire Council implemented a server consolidation and virtualization solution with IBM System x™ 8-way servers,
IBM BladeCenter® and VMware.
Benefits:
The IBM solution helped West Berkshire Council consolidate 80+ servers onto 4 IBM System x servers, reduce power connections by 80 percent and dramatically reduce server deployment time.
Case Study
Education, social services, highways, benefits, libraries and accountancy— these are just a handful of the services West Berkshire Council provides to the citizens of Berkshire, a rural area located west of London. Behind the scenes lies a huge IT infrastructure, including systems, network, backup and server storage, supporting these services for the district’s almost 150,000 residents. Pulling it all together is Simon Lawrence, the Council’s senior corporate support analyst and senior member of West Berkshire Council’s ICT Operations Team.
IT growing pains
As a public entity providing critical local government services, the Council’s IT needs are ever evolving, including demands for more 24x7 services, Web support for e-government initiatives, hosting for new systems, and ongoing legislative compliance. Eventually, the increasing IT demands began to take a toll on the Council’s existing infrastructure. “We were rapidly running out of data center rack space,” explains Lawrence. “We were running out of network connections, running out of power.” The infrastructure was also very fractured, with systems running in 3 major sites and 120 satellite sites around the district.
Facing challenges on multiple fronts, West Berkshire Council began looking at possible solutions, calling in Q Associates, an IBM Business Partner based in the UK. Q Associates used its extensive knowledge of the Council’s infrastructure, applications and processes to recommend a strategy for a council-wide server and storage consolidation and virtualization solution. This solution takes advantage of IBM’s System x3950 (formerly IBM eServer™ xSeries® 460) servers to host VMware services, and IBM BladeCenter servers to host Citrix.
“We wanted a system that we could consolidate multiple workloads on with confidence, so the IBM x3950 8-way servers were a natural choice for us,” says Lawrence. “We got the uptime, resilience and growth potential that we were looking for.”
More with less
With an aggressive migration schedule in place, Lawrence and the ICT Operations Team have successfully virtualized 50 different servers. They have 80 more to go. But the implementation has already had a measurable impact on the data center. They’re reclaiming valuable rack space. They aim to go from 220 network points down to 60, and they’ve reduced power connections from 200 to 40.
“We’re doing more with less,” says Lawrence. “That was our goal. We’re running four times as many applications per processor without any loss of performance.” The Council has been able to reduce cost and complexity while improving responsiveness and expandability. But Lawrence says the real cost savings are in time: “It used to take two to three days to build a physical server. Now I can provision a server in half an hour. It’s that simple.”
For more information
Please contact your IBM sales representative, IBM Business Partner or IBM Direct at 1 800 IBM-CALL.
Visit our Web site at: ibm.com/systems/x
For more information about West Berkshire Council visit: www.westberks.gov.uk
Products and services used
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.
Hardware:
BladeCenter, System x: System x3950, System x
Legal Information
Copyright IBM Corporation 2006 IBM Systems Group Route 100 Somers, New York 10589 U.S.A. Produced in the United States of America August 2006 All Rights Reserved BladeCenter, eServer, IBM, the IBM logo, System x and xSeries are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries or both. For a complete list of IBM trademarks, see ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml Other company, product and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. This case study is an example of how one customer uses IBM products. There is no guarantee of comparable results. References in this publication to IBM products or services do not imply that IBM intends to make them available in all countries in which IBM operates. Any references in this information to non-IBM Web sites are provided for convenience only and do not in any manner serve as an endorsement of those Web sites. The materials at those Web sites are not part of the materials for this IBM product and use of those Web sites is at your own risk.
