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Liverpool Direct Limited (LDL) is helping transform the way citizens in this British city access public services. LDL is already some way towards delivering a vision of “joined-up government” whereby everybody has access to new technology for communicating with Liverpool City Council and its Business Units. Among LDL’s responsibilities are contact centres, benefits services, human resources and payroll, and revenue services. The success of LDL has caught the attention of public-sector bodies and private-sector organizations across the U.K., encouraging the organization to start developing a strategy for shared services.

Many of LDL’s key business systems were running on two campus-clustered E10K servers, distributed across two datacenters. The mainframe-like servers were reaching the end of their operational life and support costs seemed high when compared to those of newer space-saving Sun machines with high computing power. Also, because the servers ran on the older Solaris 8 and 9 Operating Systems, they didn’t offer the virtualization technology that would be central to a flexible shared services platform. LDL wanted a turnkey solution that not only included all hardware, software and professional services, but also training so that IT personnel could manage the system on their own moving forwards.

LDL engaged Sun Professional Services, which proposed an end-to-end solution that replaced the E10K servers with Sun SPARC Enterprise T2000 servers running Solaris Cluster 3.2 software across the two datacenters. Cluster reliability was increased by the use of Quorum servers on a third site. Sun Professional Services proposed that Sun partner Esteem migrate current applications to the Solaris 10 Operating System and Sun Interim Operations Management train LDL employees on the new platform.

Frank Oakley, Solutions Architect at LDL, says, “The Sun Professional Services design, which was supported by some excellent documentation, was particularly strong, reflecting a good understanding of our business needs.” It wasn’t the first time LDL had worked with Sun Professional Services. The services team helped implement the Sun E10Ks in 2001 “Sun Professional Services always provides a consistently high level of support, strengthening our relationship with Sun,” he says.

During deployment, Sun Professional Services worked alongside BT Global Services, whose responsibility was to coordinate work on the new server platform with a concurrent data storage implementation. The Sun Interim Operations Management team was on-site for three months in total, making sure the changeover ran smoothly. Oakley says, “Engaging with the Sun Interim Operations Management team proved incredibly valuable. Despite the fact that we received good training on the new Sun technology prior to implementation, the three-month engagement with the interim team was still critical to our understanding of the new Sun platform. They helped us realize the full potential of our environment, particularly around Solaris Containers, and left us with a comprehensive handover document.”

By deploying Sun SPARC Enterprise servers, LDL has dramatically improved the processing performance and capacity of its Oracle-based business systems. With its UltraSPARC T1 processor, a single Sun SPARC T2000 server can deliver a maximum of 32 simultaneous software threads per chip. “Batch processing applications used to run all over the weekend, but the T2000s have halved that time,” says Liz Taylor Infrastructure Modernisation Programme Manager at LDL.

Applications running on the platform's Solaris Cluster include Oracle Database Server Enterprise Edition, Oracle R12 eBusiness Suite and Civica Comino DMS for document management. The new infrastructure features Solaris 10 Containers virtualization technology for the dynamic deployment of applications and Solaris 10 clustered zones to maximize availability across the campus cluster with failover between servers.

While the performance and capacity of the environment have increased, its operational and maintenance costs have gone down. The savings are due to LDL freeing up half of the Oracle licenses, purchased previously to operate the database software on the Sun E10K servers. “The new Sun T2000 infrastructure gives LDL double the processing power for half the licensing overhead,” says Kieran Skinner, Solutions Architect at LDL. Costs have been further reduced by the fact that IT personnel at LDL can complete maintenance work themselves without the need for specialist assistance. “Sun has helped us to create a commoditized server infrastructure, making it easier for our own IT personnel to maintain,” confirms Skinner.

Over the next 10 years, LDL will save £250,000 because the SPARC T2000 servers require much less power and cooling than the E10Ks. Alongside the cost reductions, another major benefit of the new infrastructure is that LDL can now scale the platform, an opportunity denied in the past because of the E10Ks' energy consumption. Says Oakley, “Replacing the E10Ks with the T2000s has greatly reduced the Data Centre footprint of our Sun platform, allowing us to develop plans for expansion of our Sun shared services offerings.”

 
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