British Columbia Ferry Services, Inc.

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BC Ferries, founded in 1960, operates 37 sea vessels serving 47 ports of call along the coast of British Columbia. With more than 4,500 employees, BC Ferries manages the largest passenger ferry line in North America and second largest in the world.

The BC Ferries IT infrastructure includes a data network that supports the company’s Oracle and Sybase databases and applications, such as reservations, scheduling, human resources and sales data. For the past eight years, BC Ferries had outsourced the management of these applications, along with servers, storage and a datacenter. However, BC Ferries needed to update its infrastructure to be able to respond faster to customer demands for online services, such as real-time schedule information. “We were falling behind in meeting our business needs, and we were negotiating new terms for the existing IT outsourced services model,” says Mike Chanin, Director of Business Support Services for IT, BC Ferries.

In January 2008, the organization chose not to renew its outsourcing contract and decided to assume greater control of its applications and infrastructure internally. As part of that decision, BC Ferries looked to build a new offsite datacenter.

In considering new technology to implement as part of this project, BC Ferries knew that it wanted to standardize its IT architecture and operating systems. “We had several different operating systems and a mix of hardware in place,” says Paul Bartle, Senior Manager of Technical Services, BC Ferries. The organization also sought to optimize its datacenter footprint. “At our old datacenter, we were maxed out on power and AC, and we could not continue to grow the way we had in the past,” says Bartle. “We needed to move to a virtual environment and we wanted to reduce our utility costs.”

BC Ferries also needed new storage systems that were resilient and offered better performance than its previous solution. Additionally, the company had to keep budget constraints in mind.

Complicating the planned IT migration was the fact that BC Ferries needed to completely repatriate its IT operations and equipment by June 30, 2008. “The summer season is our busiest season, in terms of traffic and revenue,” says Chanin. “It’s important that we don’t release a lot of IT changes during this time, because it could cause significant disruptions that affect our customers.”

In late fall 2007, BC Ferries conducted a business review that determined that significant cost savings and business agility would result from implementing technologies from Sun. During that winter, BC Ferries engaged a local Sun team to discuss modernizing the organization’s infrastructure. Local Sun Professional Services architects spent time with BC Ferries IT management to map existing applications and data pools to new Sun technology.

In March 2008, Sun and local technology partners MYRA Systems and Gentoo Systems helped BC Ferries build a new datacenter and implement Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 and M4000 servers, SPARC Enterprise T5120 servers, a Sun StorageTek 9985V system and a StorageTek L1400 tape library with four StorageTek T10000B tape drives.

The M4000 and M5000 servers are now the organization’s primary database and test/development servers; the T5120 servers are used for application layer support and run NetBackup from Symantec. “We specifically chose the Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 and M5000 servers because of their resilience, reliability and performance,” says Bartle. The organization also implemented the Solaris 10 Operating System on the Sun servers.

The 21 TB StorageTek 9985V enterprise storage system with built-in virtualization and dynamic provisioning serves as tier one storage and helps BC Ferries improve storage management, efficiency and availability, while reducing costs. The eight-slot StorageTek L1400 tape library with four high-performance StorageTek T10000B tape drives archives data for longer-term storage and retrieval. StorageTek 9900 Tiered Storage Manager software manages and automates the movement of production and test/development data to the correct storage tier based on BC Ferries’ business requirements. The encryption-ready T10000B tape drives prepare BC Ferries for future data encryption compliance requirements.

With the deployment of its new Sun solution, BC Ferries has been able to reduce the number of servers in its datacenter while increasing employee productivity and system reliability and scalability. “Increased system reliability and scalability are things we previously would not have been able to do without investing a lot of money into hardware and software,” Bartle remarks. “We now have a standardized platform and operating system, rather than different systems and pieces of hardware, resulting in reduced cost and complexity and increased employee productivity.”

BC Ferries has also gained virtualization capabilities. “We’re making use of container virtualization in Solaris 10 Operating System and embedded virtualization features of the StorageTek 9985V, so we can actually expand our IT infrastructure without having to physically grow the datacenter space,” Bartle says. “The time it takes for us to build up new servers has dropped from days or months to just a few hours,” Bartle says.

Also, because BC Ferries was able to reduce its number of physical servers and deploy energy-efficient technology from Sun, the organization has greatly reduced its power consumption. “We can now run multiple database servers on a smaller server footprint,” Bartle adds. “As a result, we have reduced a lot of power, cooling and space requirements at our new datacenter.”

Sun Services helped BC Ferries achieve these results through installation, implementation and backup and restore services. “Sun’s IT support was a big part of our success on this project,” says Afzal Chaudhry, Manager of Data Services, BC Ferries. “They took the time to understand our unique business needs, and they also spent a lot of time testing and making sure that the solution would work for us.”