Campbelltown Council partner with Logicalis to modernise data centre for new era of growth

Campbelltown Council decided to migrate and refresh their IT environment with Dell Technologies Hyper Converged Infrastructure Platform.

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Challenge

The Council had been relying on its traditional 3-tier environment comprising of storage, compute and network. The management overheads and multiple points of failure inherent in this architecture was becoming apparent and cost/resource prohibitive to maintain.

Together, Campbelltown City Council and Logicalis conducted an in-depth data centre review over a period of 12-months across multiple vendors. Dell Technologies was selected as the clear winner that met or exceeded the Council’s criteria, within budget.

Solution

The decision was made to migrate to a Dell EMC HCI environment consisting of four Pseries VxRail nodes and Dell Switching Gear.

“I did my research on various vendors in the industry, including Nutanix, Cisco and NetApp, but Dell VxRail was a stand-out, a market leader for our Council. The modern and cutting edge, ability to support and scale up and down aligned to our strategic principles to sustain and build smart environments and remain as an innovative
Council” explains Ari Aich, Head of Technology, Campbelltown City Council.

“Logicalis’s extensive knowledge within the industry and their extremely capable Consulting and Advisory team re-affirmed, through genuine insights, the decision to adopt Dell Technologies and its VxRail platform as the best fit for purpose solution,” concludes Ari.

The introduction of VxRail immediately mitigated reliability and performance issues within the primary data centre. Further, the agility of the VxRail solution and its capability to seamlessly integrate with Council’s secondary data centre (private cloud) immediately improved Council’s business continuity capabilities. This aspect was a significant contributing factor in recent times when the IT team was able to provision half of Council’s workforce (approx. 500 staff) to be able to work from home in a matter of a week. This would have been an impossible task on the old infrastructure.

Result

Since deployment of the solution, council have reaped benefits including:

• $100,000 AUD reduction in annual maintenance and support costs compared to the legacy environment.
• Average power consumption down from 30KW to 8KW equating to power bill savings of approximately $15,000 AUD per annum.
• Reduction in physical footprint – down from 2x 48 RU racks to a single rack consuming only 12 RU space.
• Significant performance improvements – SQL database batch processing now takes less than 20 minutes, rather than overnight.
• No hardware or storage related faults or incidents since installation of new Dell Technologies HCI environment.