Swedish National Police

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The NPB relies on tax collections for its operating budget and seeks to meet the agency's primary mission of fighting crime, while making every IT dollar count. Over time, the Police Board's aging and decentralized storage network became more difficult to manage. Growing data storage and access needs added to the problem, straining the storage network. "Whereas the police service used to have a decentralized IT organization, responsibility has now been transferred to our central IT unit," says Hampus Lind, Storage Solution Architect for the police force. "We felt that moving to a consolidated operating environment based on the Sun StorageTek SL8500 library would enhance employee productivity, save costs, and increase the crime-fighting effectiveness of our officers."

The NPB consolidated four regional storage environments across the country into a single main operating centre in Stockholm using the Sun StorageTek SL8500 modular library system for its current and future data backup needs, while also utilizing the agency's existing TimberWolf 9740 tape libraries cascaded to support reserve operations and the mainframe development environment. According to Lind, "This and the large systems planned for the future have led us to opt for a huge-capacity modular library that offers us room for expansion."

With the Sun StorageTek SL8500 library, the NPB centrally stores images and information from criminal investigations. Police personnel can now access those digital images -- including video film material -- from the scene of a crime, from anywhere in the country. "The consolidated crime scene data makes it possible for officers around the nation to access it and collaborate to solve and prevent crimes," explains Lind. The NPB currently handles about seven terabytes of data. "We're making more and more use of digital images and video footage. These formats require a lot of space to back up, which makes the scalability of the solution very attractive. We now have a lot of headroom to grow. And when the time comes to add capacity, we'll be able to do it incrementally on a modular basis to suit our budget."

In addition to scalability, the Sun storage solution has provided an essential consolidation platform -- rather than running separate data backups at each of the four former storage sites, the NPB runs a single consolidated process at its new Stockholm facility. "By consolidating four centres down to one, the agency saved up to 75 percent in operational expenses," says Lind. "In addition to these hard savings, employee and officer productivity have also increased. The T9840C and LTO Gen 3 tape drives have a much faster throughput than their predecessors. Over the course of thousands of data requests, that adds up to improved efficiency for our people who can now do more in less time. And from a management perspective, it's much easier. The simplified data backup environment makes it possible for us to manage more data with fewer people."