The Department of Education - Infrastructure Refresh & Storage Solution

ICT Project of The Year 2008 (Public Sector)

The Department of Education is a central government department with responsibility for over 927,000 fulltime students and over 52,000 teaching staff in primary, secondary and third level education throughout the twenty six counties of Ireland.

Background

The Department runs some of the largest databases in the country in an Oracle environment that consisted of a combination of legacy IBM pSeries and RS 6000 servers. This infrastructure was in a very distributed layout in that each server had its own designated direct attached storage & tape backup unit. As their needs grew this infrastructure model became highly inefficient. It was also very costly to power and maintain and did not adequately support their test and development requirements.

Requirement

Their requirements included the need to manage their data in a more efficient & secure manner and to be more dynamically able to utilise their Oracle development team.  As part of their test and development environment they required greater levels of storage to enable them to take snapshots of their data at any given time.

The Department needed a new infrastructure design that could grow with their needs into the future. Further to this, they needed to partner with a company that could offer a "teaming" solution that would deliver comprehensive telephone / email and onsite support as well as assistance in the day-to-day administration of the environment which included technologies new to The Department such as SAN, Enterprise Consolidated Backup, Logical and Virtual Partitioning.

Solution

To fully meet their needs Origina carried out a full analysis of the environment and by working closely with The Departments' IT team provided a tailored solution around four key areas:

Server solution

A full refresh of the server environment was completed using 12 x IBM UNIX servers using logical & virtual partitioning which allows The Department to run multiple independent servers on a single physical server. Had they chosen to run their operations on physical servers alone, the end requirement would have been in excess of thirty servers. This would have resulted in a huge increase in power and data centre overheads, not to mention the massive software licensing overhead that would have been incurred on software such as Oracle which is licensed per processor.

Centralised Storage

The Department implemented a new SAN infrastructure that included two IBM DS4700 units, one designated for test & development and one for their production needs. Origina have set this up in a manner which allows The Department take multiple snapshots of production data from the production SAN and move them into the test & development area very quickly - a key requirement of The Department's Oracle team.

Consolidated Backup & Disaster Recovery

Because they were moving to a centralised storage infrastructure with a much greater volume of test & development, data backup and archiving was always going to be a key component of the project. Origina provided a solution that consisted of an IBM Enterprise tape library on the primary site and a smaller backup library on the Disaster Recovery site.

The backup & archiving is controlled using IBM Tivoli Storage Manager software which is specifically configured to handle large volumes of Oracle data used by The Department  and in the event of a Disaster, can be used to get back up and running in the DR site in a matter of hours.

Support and Teaming

The new environment is supported by Origina through a dedicated help desk that enables staff from The Department to gain access to a dedicated team giving immediate assistance in relation to all specific queries on the environment. Origina also provide a dedicated monitoring service whereby a number of times per week their complete environment is scrutinised for current or upcoming issues such as problems with database sizes, problems with disk space, firmware upgrades etc. This dedicated support further enables The Department to streamline their in-house operations and allows them integrate and use leading edge technologies.

Key Benefits

This solution gives The Department of Education a new base infrastructure that is highly scalable and upgradeable into the future. By using IBM's logical and virtual partitioning The Department has been able to dramatically reduce its requirement for enterprise software licences such as Oracle. Although this is similar to the benefits customers in Intel environments can achieve using VMware, IBM's partitioning technology has been well established in the market for many years now.

The server and storage consolidation mean that the environment is easier to administer and manage going forward. Also, the costs incurred in their data centre floor space and the electricity costs of powering many servers have also been dramatically reduced.

The Department also benefits from the fact that the entire environment is being supported and monitored on a daily basis by Origina's team of highly skilled consultants under an "Origina Teaming Contract".

Tomás O'Leary, Managing Director of Origina, said: "The consolidation of their server and storage environment has made The Department's IT infrastructure dramatically more streamlined and cost efficient. Power, Space and Cooling costs have all been reduced and very significant cost savings have been made in Enterprise Database Licence costs. Also, the new environment is highly scalable and significantly easier to maintain going forward"