Province of Nova Scotia
Provincial Government Steps Up Its Service Offering with New Sun Fire V490 Servers and the Solaris 10 Operating SystemNova Scotia may be one of Canada's smallest provinces, but it’s quickly becoming an information technology powerhouse with it’s SAP implementations in the public sector. With nearly one- million residents, Nova Scotia's economy has traditionally depended on fishing, mining, forestry, and agriculture and tourism; more recently it has expanded to include finance, technology, film, and music. All provincial ministries and most public-sector entities receive SAP IT services from the Corporate Information Systems division within the Department of Finance. There has been dramatic growth in the last 5 years of public sector organizations implementing SAP Financials, HR/Payroll, Plant Maintenance, IS/Retail, IS Utilities and Customer Relationship Management. Customer Challenges
SolutionTo create a more flexible infrastructure, reduce downtime, and ensure high availability of SAP applications, the Province of Nova Scotia replaced legacy systems with clustered Sun Fire V490 servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System and Solaris Cluster 3.2 for high availability. It also took advantage of the virtualization features of the StorageTek 9985 system to increase flexibility and reduce downtime. Business Results
Story DetailsCorporate Information Systems, a division of the Nova Scotia Department of Finance, has become a leading provider of outsourced SAP services among public sector organizations in Canada. What began as a service to a few provincial government entities now extends to Nova Scotia school and hospital boards, the Regional Housing Authorities, Nova Scotia Liquor Corporation, and many of the province's municipalities and cities. The applications that Corporate Information Systems provides are primarily SAP modules (such as Enterprise Resource Planning, Customer Relationship Management, Business Warehouse, and Portal) that depend on Oracle databases. In 2003, anticipating the expansion of its services, the Province selected Sun as its technology provider based on technology architecture, price performance, and comprehensive support services. Sun helped the Province migrate SAP from its existing HP systems to a Sun infrastructure based on Sun Fire 15K servers running the Solaris 8 Operating System. To provide high availability and failover, the servers were clustered using Solaris Cluster 3.2.
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Solaris is extremely reliable and Sun's support staff is outstanding. They're always there for us and work to fit our schedule whenever we need them. The value of being able to call anytime and get help is immeasurable.”
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— Rod Hipson, Senior Technical Architect, Corporate Information Systems, Province of Nova Scotia
Since 2003, the SAP user base has grown from 2,000 to more than 10,000. In addition, about 20,000 employees use the system to check personal information such as pay stubs, and these number is projected to double by the end of 2008. In order to meet the increasing demand, the Province upgraded its environment in 2007 with about 40 Sun servers, including the Sun Fire V890, Sun Fire V490, and Sun Fire T2000, all running Solaris 10. “CPU, memory, and storage are all redundant in the new infrastructure, so the systems are highly available,” says Rod Hipson, Senior Technical Architect, Corporate Information Systems, Province of Nova Scotia. The group plans to use Solaris Containers to create virtual servers on the Sun Fire V490 servers for three SAP databases of different sizes. Then the two servers will be clustered, with the second node mirroring the first as a failover node. “Using Solaris Containers, we can pool resources and control the amount of processing on one system without interfering with the other system,” says Hipson. “That gives us a lot of flexibility to deal with peak demands.” The Sun T2000 Servers will be used as SAP portal servers. “The Sun T2000 is very reliable and provides great performance for a multithreaded application,” says Hipson. Reducing downtime was another goal for Corporate Information Systems. In the past, it could take days to install SAP upgrades or patches, but now SAP applications run outside of the cluster — so if an application fails, it can be started on another node within minutes. “That definitely helps us reduce downtime and meet our SLAs,” says Hipson. The Sun StorageTek 9985 system also helps to reduce downtime. “The built-in storage virtualization features in the Sun StorageTek 9985 system have enabled us to easily reallocate storage to specific servers when needed without shutting them down.” The new smaller and more eco-efficient Sun systems not only represent a cost savings of about 40 percent but also help conserve power and valuable floor space in the group's crowded datacenter. “Every area of government is expected to contribute to our greening initiative. Having a highly flexible, shared technology environment allows us to contribute in a very positive way while also delivering increased value to our clients,” says Steven Feindel, Director of Corporate Information Systems, Province of Nova Scotia. Hipson says it's important not to forget the significant role that Sun Support Services plays in the partnership with the Province. Since 2003, when the Province chose Sun as a strategic business partner, it has worked side by side with Sun as its “infrastructure collaborator.” Sun Support Services does all system installations, deployment of new clusters, and other associated tasks. “Solaris is very well supported by the local support staff,” says Hipson. He adds that the group has a very close relationship with Sun technicians and treats them as an integral part of its team. |
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