Bringing HPE Nimble Storage dHCI to Ireland with Wexford County Council
BACKGROUND
The mission of the Contracting Authority at Wexford County Council is to improve the quality of life of the people of Wexford by representing the interests of citizens and providing services to meet their needs. The Contracting Authority is responsible for the provision of an extensive range of public services, such as Housing, Planning, Roads, Development incentives & controls, Environmental protection & recreation facilities and amenities to the growing population of Wexford County.
Information technology is critical for the Contracting Authority and technology planning aligns with the strategic goals of the Contracting Authority to –
- Advance the mission of the Contracting Authority through the use of innovation and effective technologies, resources and services
- Advance business processes and operational efficiencies through effective implementation of technology
- Leverage secure, reliable and efficient information technology infrastructure to maximise staff capability, foster innovation and excellence
The IT Department supports approximately 600 users across 14 sites through a mix of technologies, using an internal team of 20 staff supplemented by outsourced support in some areas.
The IT department’s objectives within Wexford County Council include:
- Improve efficiency
- Simplify operational management
- Provide efficient data protection through back up
- Reduce overall running costs
- Easily scalable to accommodate future data growth
- Deliver a robust, resilient technology infrastructure
SOLUTION
Wexford County Council were looking for the supply, installation, and commissioning of a resilient active-passive disaggregated hyper converged infrastructure solution to cover compute, storage, and networking requirements and to include a cloud enabled backup facility.
The solution had to comprise the flexibility to scale storage and compute independently due to additional technologies being used by County Councils, such as high-resolution scanning of paper documents, drone footage and an ever-increasing geographical dataset. These technologies had differing compute and storage requirements in order to run efficiently.
The solution included a comprehensive enterprise level backup offering with onsite (primary), disaster recovery and public cloud ready expansion capability.
The solution contained unified support of all hardware and software components for three years.
Key to the project also was the upgrade of Wexford County Council’s current core Cisco switches. The current devices had reached the end of support and an upgrade was required in order to provide a fully validated design of the storage and compute solution designs by any new hardware vendor. The switches were from a single vendor including core, storage and access layers to simplify management.
One technology partner’s solution stood out and met the design principals of the requirements as laid out in the tender. HPE Nimble Storage dHCI (disaggregated hyperconverged infrastructure) provided the flexibility to scale storage and compute independently, making it ideal for mission-critical databases.
“HPE Nimble Storage dHCI gives us a more flexible IT infrastructure and excellent visibility, making it easier to monitor and control in real time. With HPE Nimble Storage dHCI, we are able to reduce our operating costs and improve our server’s performance,” said Fintan Kirwan, IS Project Leader at Wexford County Council
RESULT
HPE Nimble Storage dHCI greatly increased the speed of deployment and common operations, while reducing the administrative complexity associated with those same operations. Offering an improved level of administrative simplicity, data efficiency, and native bidirectional data movement across data centres and public cloud providers with HPE cloud volumes, HPE Nimble Storage dHCI was a noteworthy solution choice.
HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is a Converged System built on HPE Infosight and integrated VM management which makes it simple to manage and scales from rack-to-apps in minutes.
Consolidation of Wexford County Council’s independent technology stacks into a single unit—the hyperconverged model— minimised both capital and operational expenditures by unifying support of all hardware and software components of the council’s storage and compute requirements for 5 years.
“HPE Nimble Storage dHCI has improved our backup capabilities and disaster recovery, which are vital for Wexford County Council as our colleagues and employees adapt to remote working. HPE Nimble Storage dHCI has the ability to predict and prevent disruptions ensuring we could continue to work as normal,” said Fintan Kirwan, IS Project Leader at Wexford County Council.
HPE’s Infosight is the platform that provides these management tools to the council. HPE InfoSight is an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that is built on a unique approach to data collection and analysis, an approach that goes well beyond depending on the logs and obvious metrics that are used in traditional infrastructure.
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