Isle of Anglesey County Council

The Challenge

As with many utilities companies, WPD relies heavily on intelligent software and IT services to manage critical aspects of its business. The company required an alternative approach to dealing with its software asset management, licence compliance and cost effective software acquisition for data management, reporting and workload scheduling. The existing method was time consuming and tied up valuable human resource to manage the interactions with the vendor whilst maintaining control and compliance. In addition to this, issues with spiraling management licensing costs required addressing, to enable IT to align software spending with its business priorities.

The Solution

Taking a smarter approach

To ensure that it could meet the growing demands generated by its digital transformation, the Council implemented a new tiered storage environment based on IBM technology. “Flash storage has long been on our horizon, but when it first came onto the market it was just too expensive for us. That changed when we came across IBM® FlashSystem® 900, which gives us the ultra-fast performance of flash at a reasonable price point. We also felt more confident in the stability of flash solutions, as they now have a proven track-record.” comments John Thomas.

Neil Summers adds: “We also chose to deploy IBM Storwize® V7000, a hybrid storage system that supports standard, solid-state, and flash drives. Combined with the IBM Virtual Storage Center, we gained an end-to-end solution that offers us much greater capabilities, but is still easy to manage.”

Engaging IBM Premier Business Partner Celerity to implement the installation, Neil Summers continues: “Celerity clearly knew what they were doing at all stages of the implementation, making it a very smooth experience.” 

The new storage landscape supports systems that are essential to the Isle of Anglesey County Council, including its revenue and benefits, human resources, and payroll management applications. By deploying IBM FlashSystem and Storwize in an active-active configuration across two datacenters, the Council will enable truly continuous operations.

“The IBM solutions offer lots of built-in features that enable a much smarter approach to storage management. The tiering all happens automatically, so we never have to worry about it—the hottest data is continually being moved to flash so that it’s available the fastest. With IBM Metro Mirror, we can replicate data synchronously at the storage level, while taking advantage of IBM FlashCopy® means that we do not have to interrupt operations for backups or testing: we simply take a live snapshot and do what we want with it!” adds John Thomas.

The Results

Enabling services that wow citizens

The Isle of Anglesey County Council is now better equipped to cope with large amounts of data and peaks in demand, helping it meet—and even exceed—its service level targets.

By deploying a tiered storage environment based on IBM technology implemented by Celerity, the Council ensured that deluges of data do not get in the way of service continuity. 

“We can now dynamically provision storage resources, adapting our infrastructure to better meet the needs of the council,” remarks John Thomas. “When bad weather or a big event is coming up, we often experience a big spike in visitors to our website. Using the IBM solution, we can scale up resources to ensure that performance does not drop, no matter what.”

Recently, the flexibility of the council’s new storage environment was put to the test, as Neil Summers explains: “We had a two-week window to move our website servers from a hosted datacenter to our own infrastructure and complete all the necessary testing. Our Digital Services Manager was amazed at just how quickly and easily we were able to complete the move to the IBM solutions. We all breathed a sigh of relief at the lack of impact to citizen services—as far as they were concerned, the process was entirely invisible.”

Offering a lower total cost of ownership alongside greater capabilities than the previous storage platform, the new solution is helping the Isle of Anglesey County Council deliver better value for money to citizens.

Neil Summers elaborates: “Packing much more capacity within a smaller footprint than the storage landscape we had before, the IBM solution offers key cost savings. And because it can handle much larger amounts of data, it is the ideal platform to support measures such as digitization of paper documents and agile working.”

Next, the Isle of Anglesey County Council is considering the use of analytics to extract insights that will help it to raise service levels even further. 

John Thomas concludes: “Our next big focus is analytics, which we could use to do things like identify vulnerable families so we can offer them helpearlier, improving outcomes and reducing overall costs. With IBM storage solutions in place, we don’t need to hesitate: we are free to innovate, confident that they will be able to support us in whatever we decide to do next.”