Local Authority

The Challenge

The Local Authority was faced with the need to address a shortage of in-house skills to support key services in their infrastructure and needed a reliable service partner that could manage and support their high availability server environment at a cost effective price.

Continuous monitoring and support of systems was required, as part of the daily operation of their legacy UNIX (AIX), SAN and Backup environments to ensure uptime is maintained to a high-level and pro-active support available when needed.

“We had a need to engage with a partner that could offer us an effective, Service Level Agreement backed service at a reasonable cost when staff availability meant we were unable to continue providing the service effectively in-house”, commented the Authority’s Service Delivery Manager.

The Solution

Celerity was selected to provide a number of key support functions to the Local Authority using their in-house team of experts and industry standard tools. By implementing Celerity’s Intuition Monitoring solution running 24x7x365, the system is managed in a pro-active manner ensuring that key systems are maintained and highly available.

If the system detects a potential or actual system failure – an under-performing disk drive or a database server running out of memory – it immediately generates an alert to ensure that prompt action is taken to prevent or minimise downtime. By providing a more accurate picture of the operations and capabilities of the system environments, Intuition Monitoring is integral to the Authority’s efforts to continually maintain and improve performance and reliability of service.

“Our relationship grew from a pre-existing occasional supplier level where we procured the odd item of hardware or day of consultancy, into a strong partnership with Celerity sharing the stewardship of our infrastructure for our citizens”.

The Results

"Celerity have been proven to be technically strong, flexible and responsive partners, adding proactive value with their experience as well as delivering the required services and project work to a high standard.”

In addition to monitoring the environment, Celerity provides an ITIL Service Desk function to the Authority to log calls for changes and incidents that may occur in their AIX and IBM Spectrum Protect environments. Calls logged by the Service Desk are managed by a dedicated in-house team to deliver the solution to the incident within an agreed service level.

Celerity also provides daily housekeeping to the Authority’s supported infrastructure, ensuring key events take place and the systems are operating at the recommended performance.

As part of the overall service, account management is provided, producing monthly statistical reports demonstrating performance of systems, SLAs as well as Spectrum Protect storage capacity usage to reduce or prevent an increase in licensing costs for the council.

The monitoring solution implemented by Celerity has provided key services to meet customer expectations and has resulted in a reduction in operational overheads.

Benefits to the Client:

• Remote technical support to reduce system downtime
• Early warning of impending issues of a critical nature
• Reassurance that systems are operating as expected within tolerance
• Scheduled reporting capability
• Back up reporting
• Daily housekeeping on the environment
• Improved productivity and availability
• Access to resource that is not available on-site
• Notification of issues internal personnel have no capability to diagnose
• Accurate capacity planning
• Services delivered to SLA
• Reduce costs for project workWhy Celerity?Celerity’s long-term commitment to a successful relationship in achieving the Council’s and government objectives made Celerity the obvious choice for the future. As an experienced and flexible partner, Celerity realises that things can and do change, ensuring that client needs are dealt with and changes are managed through a structured, yet flexible, contractual approach.