Province of Flemish Brabant

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Belgium is often called the heart of Europe, and the Province of Flemish Brabant lies in the heart of Belgium. The citizens of Flemish Brabant, with its bustling economy and lively culture, rely on its provincial government for essential services, and for many years, the government has relied on Sun for the critical IT infrastructure components that make those services possible.

“Our organization has an awful lot of duties,” says Marc Vervloet, Chief Information Officer for the Province of Flemish Brabant. “And many of them are entrusted to just one person. It’s quite a challenge.”

Karl Pottie, Manager of Computer Systems says, “Maintaining all our systems with a very small staff of only two system engineers is feasible only if the department’s IT solutions don’t demand a lot of work. Fortunately, our Sun-based systems are extremely reliable. For example, over a 13-year period, we’ve had only one failure that could have jeopardized our service level — a broken disk on a server that was nine years old.”

The environment that the IT department manages includes 900 PCs in 30 locations and 60 servers (including virtual servers) running on multiple operating systems. However, all mission-critical functions are handled by the department’s 20 physical Sun servers, seven of which are running the Solaris 10 Operating System. The Solaris 10 machines are virtualized into a total of 23 servers using Solaris Containers. “Thanks to Solaris, I have no problem whatsoever keeping our Sun servers up and running,” says Pottie. “That’s not at all the case with more-widespread operating systems that often behave erratically. Plus, we rarely need to deploy patches for Solaris.” Using Solaris Containers, the organization achieved a 2:1 consolidation ratio for its SAP servers and a 5:1 ratio for several smaller applications, saved roughly 40% in new server investment costs, and cut physical space and power requirements by about 50%.

Additionally, the organization’s servers are backed by SunSpectrum Service. “The SunSpectrum service plan provides us peace of mind with 24x7 support,” says Vervloet.

As part of an IT growth initiative proposed by the province’s governor, Flemish Brabant chose an outside company to manage an expanded IT network that includes all local government authorities. “Although the project is administered by an autonomous company, the servers within this important network are also Sun products,” Vervloet emphasizes.

The IT department’s strategic application development platform is Java EE 5. The content management system for the province’s web site, several document and workflow functions, and nearly all the organization’s custom Internet applications are based on Java. Additionally, the IT department has deployed Java-based geographical information systems that provide decision-support functions for geographical-related applications.

Next, the Flemish Brabant IT department plans to further reduce management, maintenance, and power consumption costs by replacing physical servers with fewer but higher-performance machines that support more virtual servers. The department hopes to use some of the savings to build a disaster recovery site. Pottie looks forward to these projects and to continuing the long relationship with Sun. He concludes, “Back in 1995, after reviewing competing bids, we found that Sun servers were our best choice. Although we’ve continued a policy of reviewing bids for new IT projects ever since, the wisdom of that initial decision has been confirmed many times.”