Government of Prince Edward Island, Canada

Story Details

To provide its citizens with critical services, the Government of Prince Edward Island (PEI) needs reliable, efficient IT systems. In 2007, as a first step in reducing IT costs and improving service, PEI’s government departments consolidated their separate IT divisions into a single Information Technology Shared Services (ITSS) group within the Provincial Treasury. The next step was to simplify and standardize the resulting heterogeneous IT environment. “We conducted an inventory and found 300 separate systems and more than 500 servers in 38 locations,” explains Chris Payne, director of infrastructure and IT Shared Services for the Government of Prince Edward Island. “We had a variety of Windows, Novel, and Linux applications and no central or unified architecture.”

To address this challenge, PEI worked with its IT partners VisionQuest and Bulletproof Solutions. They concluded that migrating applications to virtual servers would be the most cost-effective option. In early 2008, the organizations looked at offerings from IBM, HP, and Dell, but ultimately chose Sun hardware as the foundation of a new virtualized environment. “The main reason we liked Sun was reliability,” says Desmond Lecky, managing partner at VisionQuest. “We designed a comparable platform based on Sun Fire servers in 2002, and it still never gives us any trouble.” Jeff Shaw, vice president of operations at Bulletproof Solutions, adds, “The Sun platform’s high performance, scalability, and small footprint appealed to us. We also liked being able to leverage Sun services and support for high-quality, expert assistance.” And Payne appreciated the close collaboration between the companies. He says, “A big deciding factor for us was the team approach that Sun took in working with our partners to build a solution that fits our needs. We also need knowledgeable partners to help us learn how to maximize the benefits of virtualization for the Province.”

The new solution includes a Sun Blade 6000 chassis — the foundation of the Sun Blade 6000 Modular System — with five Sun Blade X6250 Server Modules, each with two quad-core Intel Xeon processors, running VMware Infrastructure 3 virtualization software. Two-tier storage is based on the Sun StorageTek 6140 array, with Fibre Channel drives for high-performance storage and SATA-II drives for high capacity, and a Sun StorageTek SL48 tape library with two LTO 3 tape drives. The array’s storage capacity is 5 TB. The Sun servers and storage array are connected by Brocade Silkworm 200E SAN switches, and Symantec Veritas NetBackup software provides backup capabilities. The solution is backed by a SunSpectrum support plan. In July 2008, Sun Enterprise Installation and Implementation Services assisted with deployment. VisionQuest hosts the virtual environment for PEI in a leased datacenter, and Bulletproof Solutions continues to provide technical support.

The five Sun blades initially replaced 40 of PEI’s existing physical servers. By retiring these servers, PEI is saving 58% a year on labor, support, power, cooling, and datacenter costs. Plus, PEI avoids the cost of purchasing physical servers for new applications or as replacements for aging equipment, saving an additional $224,000 a year on acquisition costs, setup, and ongoing maintenance and support. PEI expects to increase these savings by adding more blades, eventually replacing as many of its traditional physical servers as possible with virtual ones.

Additionally, many IT tasks now require less time and effort. “Backing up one SAN is much easier than backing up many separate physical servers,” says Lecky. “And disaster recovery is simpler too, if we ever need it. We could take a snapshot of the virtual servers and restore them to another site in a few hours, and it would cost about 65% less than restoring a traditional environment.”

As another benefit, PEI can deploy new applications and services on virtual servers in five to seven days, versus several weeks for physical servers — or even in minutes if the applications use a predefined server configuration. PEI has also gained high system reliability, with 99.999% uptime. Payne concludes, “With Sun’s expertise and high-quality hardware, we reached our goal of building a platform that would run whatever applications we put on it and would be available for our clients 24/7.”