State of Michigan, Department of Labor and Economic Growth

Consolidating Statewide Server Sites Reduces Costs to Taxpayers

The State of Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Growth (DLEG) manages business development and employment services resources for the state. DLEG employs more than 5500 people. Among the 25 agencies that make up DLEG are the Commission for the Blind, the Energy Office, the Michigan Employment Relations Division and the Worker's Compensation Agency.

Customer Challenges

State budgetary issues and legislator directives led to a departmental mandate to leverage technological resources across multiple agencies
Efficiency initiative required a seamless migration and consolidation of 5 server environments and 42 applications to one hosting facility and one disaster recovery site

Solution

DLEG consolidated its datacenter and Web, application, and database server environment with a Sun Enterprise Consolidation Solution.

Business Results

Reduced IT costs across three agencies by more than $500,000 per year
Consolidation completed in less than 6 months with no application failures affecting end users
Increased systems administrator productivity by 60%
Decreased time to deploy new applications by 70%
Application environment centrally controlled with all applications running the same versions of Solaris and Oracle

Products and Services

Sun Fire V480 Server
Sun Fire 15K Server
Sun Blade 2500 Workstation
Sun StorEdge 6320 System
Solaris 9 Operating System
Server/storage consolidation services
Application Migration Services
Application Readiness Service
Sun Virtualization Suite of Services

Story Details

The State of Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Growth's (DLEG) Oracle applications have run on Sun Solaris-based servers for more than a decade. As demand for services grew, DLEG simply added more servers to host its database and Web applications. By 2004, the department had deployed 42 applications hosted on 128 servers in 5 server environments around the state. These servers were running a number of versions of the Solaris Operating System and Oracle database. Maintaining so many servers and versions was costly and time-consuming. A state-wide mandate to leverage technology and people across agencies led DLEG to consolidate its server infrastructure.

" Sun's unique offering in the area of enterprise consolidation has dramatically reduced the financial headache of supporting disconnected and distributed systems while affording us the time to deliver more services to the people and businesses of Michigan. "

— Jim Hogan, Information Officer, State of Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Growth

DLEG chose the Sun Fire 15K server running Solaris 9, confident the server's redundancy and domain partitioning capabilities would best meet the performance needs of individual agencies. Sun's close working relationship with Oracle was a significant influencing factor in the decision. With expertise from Sun consultants, the department seamlessly ported all 42 applications onto the server in less than six months.

Additionally, Sun consultants helped centralize DLEG's data center and Web and application server environment onto eight Sun Fire V240 servers, and installed a Sun Blade 2500 workstation for systems administration. This provided better application control, since all programs run on the same version of Solaris 9 and Oracle9i . Deploying new applications has decreased by 70 percent and systems administrator productivity has increased by 60 percent.

Sun consultants also helped DLEG with its data backup and storage needs. Centralizing storage using a five terabyte Sun StorEdge 6320 system--attached to a Sun Fire V480 server hosting storage software and a Sun StorEdge L180 tape library with LTO2 drive technology--allows administrators to back up data directly over the storage area network instead of the local area network, increasing server and network availability. Sun system support and training services help ensure system integrity and availability.

The DLEG consolidation is even benefiting other departments. Critical applications from other departments have been moved to DLEG's secure, scalable environment. All told, the State of Michigan has lowered monthly maintenance and operating costs for these departments by $500,000 per year. That's good news for Michigan taxpayers, who benefit both from higher levels of service and lower expenses.