Leeds City Council

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Leeds City Council has multiple responsibilities, administering services related to education, housing, social services, and many more municipal functions. The organization depends on its ICT systems to deliver them efficiently. If a system fails, the delivery of public services can be interrupted.

For more than 10 years, the city has utilized products and technologies from Sun to provide part of the foundation of its IT infrastructure. Last year, when the Sun data storage systems that support the multiple organizational applications, for example, human resources, benefits, and social care databases required upgrading, the city's ICT Services liaised with Sun Professional Services.

Working together, Sun’s consultants and the city’s ICT Services management team determined that the existing storage system should be replaced with four Sun StorageTek 6540 storage arrays connected in a Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN). Two of the devices were deployed in production and two at the test and development site. Sun StorageTek Data Replicator software was chosen to provide enhanced business continuity, with Sun StorageTek L180 tape libraries for the backup solution.

The city had considered other comparable storage solutions but decided that the Sun StorageTek arrays were more cost-effective. “Our main priority was to ensure we never lose data,” says Melvin Thompson, UNIX infrastructure manager for Leeds City Council. “The Sun system offers data replication capabilities that are quite impressive. Having a second copy of data aligns with our strategy to move toward a true disaster recovery solution in the near future.”

Beyond just helping the city select a storage solution, Sun helped deploy it as well. Thompson says, “Sun took the time to understand our existing infrastructure, looking at our host bus adapters, switches, fibre links, disk layout, and the requirements of the devices we’d be attaching to the 6540 arrays. We worked together and came to an agreement on what the new infrastructure should look like.”

Working with the city’s ICT Services, Sun Professional Services managed the migration from the previous storage platform to the new one. The Services team helped the city’s IT staff understand requirements and dependencies, conduct site surveys for incoming equipment, and make sure the environment was properly provisioned. Thanks to careful planning and close cooperation, the two teams accomplished the migration, including extracting the old hardware, with no disruption to vital services and no data loss.

Sun also offered roadmaps to advise the city’s ICT Services as it continually upgrades a portion of its more than 100 Sun servers as they age. The city has for years had an extensive deployment of a variety of Sun systems. For example, the city recently began migrating from older Sun Fire 12K, 15K, 280R, V120, and V480 servers to existing Sun Fire E25K and T2000 servers as well as to new Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 servers, all backed by a SunSpectrum Platinum service plan.

Additionally, Sun Learning Services trains ICT staff in new product features and technologies, such as the Solaris 10 Operating System and Solaris Containers. The city is using Solaris Containers to virtualize applications that run on the city’s T2000 servers. As an example of using servers more efficiently, the IT department was able to consolidate the 19 physical servers that ran the city’s Siebel implementation into just 5, saving money on power, cooling, and maintenance. “Virtualization offers a big advantage to us,” says Thompson. “Before, we needed separate Web, database, and multiple application servers for many applications. Now, as long as the server has sufficient performance, we can combine many functions into one box, improving utilization and reducing costs.”