Industry:
South Somerset District Council
The Challenge:
Infrastructure Performance Issues
The Solution:
Infrastructure Assessment and
Dell EMC Unity All Flash Array
Benefits:
- Improved and Increased Performance
- Reduced Support Calls
- Reduced SAN Footprint
- Power and Cooling Advantage
Company Profile
South Somerset District Council (SSDC) aim to provide a place where businesses flourish, communities are safe, vibrant and healthy; where residents enjoy good housing and cultural, leisure and sporting activities.
The core focus of SSDC’s work centre around five key areas: High quality cost effective services, Economy, Environment, Homes, Health and Communities. By addressing these areas, SSDC want to create a modern, responsive, pro-active council, serving South Somerset district. The transformation programme focuses on developing the culture and working practices needed to support a flexible, customer focused council with a modern, commercial approach.
The Challenge
SSDC embarked on a transformational program to improve the services provided to local residents, whilst simultaneously reducing costs. Expenditure within councils are always going to come under intense scrutiny, therefore SSDC needed to be clear with their transformational plan and how it would improve the offerings provided to local residents.
SSDC needed to re-evaluate the way services were being developed whilst refreshing their technology. The final aim for SSDC was to improve the services provided to residents whilst reducing overall costs. The existing technologies that underpinned the transformation at SSDC was struggling to cope with the transformational change required. There were a host of performance issues, lack of workforce agility, caused by an infrastructure struggling to cope, leading to a direct impact on staff performance.
The Solution
MTI provided consultancy via their pre-sales team to establish the shape of the solution with the transformational program in mind. MTI deployed a team of technical specialists to identify the root cause of the issue within the infrastructure. Performance logs from various parts of the overall environment were obtained and analysed.
The in-depth analysis undertaken revealed a bottleneck in IO (Input/Output) traffic within the SAN platform. The performance of the existing SAN was struggling to cope with the ever-increasing IO demands of SSDC’s virtual ndesktop environment.
As a result of the analysis and recommendation, SSDC deployed a state-of-the-art Dell EMC Unity 400 All Flash Array (AFA) providing increased IO performance to unprecedented levels for SSDC’s business.
Results
The primary beneficiaries of the enhanced solution were the end-users. The increase and improvement in performance has led to a significantly reduced amount of support calls raised with SSDC’s internal IT ServiceDesk.
“By addressing the bottleneck issues and the new storage implemented, productivity and efficiency were positively affected through the introduction of the all flash solution” explained David Chubb, Lead Specialist IT Support Service.
As a result of this, SSDC were able to reduce the footprint of the SAN as well as benefit from power and cooling advantages. In addition, issues caused by the IO bottleneck, stopped after the implementation of the new solution.
Being able to call upon the expert advice that MTI provide is so important to us, as experts in storage and security we know we are getting the best guidance available.
David Chubb
Lead Specialist IT Support Service South Somerset District Council
Why MTI?
MTI were bought in to help SSDC along their transformational journey as part of a select trusted group of suppliers. “It was an easy decision for the Council to work with MTI again, the trusted partnership and the reliance on MTI’s expert knowledge meant that we knew we were in safe hands” said David Chubb. MTI had also previously successfully provided primary infrastructure as well as SSDC’s backup & recovery environment.
MTI were always on-hand to provide strategic guidance for SSDC. The knowledge that MTI are always on hand to provide strategic advice is a key factor to the successful relationship. MTI’s consultative approach was also cited as a contributing factor to the partnership.
