Kent County Council Case Study

Case Study

Sector: Public services

Esdebe rescued a landmark consolidation project after it had to be abandoned by another IT consutancy

With a population approaching 1.5 million, a road network of 8,500km and around 300 town and parish councils, Kent County Council covers England’s largest non-metropolitan county, in a two-tier arrangement.

Business Benefits

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Environment scales from 20 to more than 200 servers Backups can now be managed within a single team Reduced software licensing costs 50+ daily storage tape backups no longer required Now backing up 12,700 more jobs per night, in less time Improved quality of service while lowering running costs Simplified IT administration Excellent post-project care

The Challenge Prior to restructuring, Kent County Council’s ICT backup infrastructure was fragmented, required four teams to maintain it, and needed to be streamlined while increasing its scalability.

The infrastructure was built on Sun Enterprise UNIX servers, Symantec Backup Exec and a legacy version of NetBackup. It was labour intensive to maintain and relied on local tape backups. As part of its consolidation plan, the council needed a dual data centre, centralised environment that would scale to more than 200 servers.

The new environment would use Symantec’s NetBackup installed on theStorage Foundation product which includes Veritas Cluster Server and Veritas Volume Replicator.

Kent County Council commissioned an IT consultancy to design and build the new environment.

Unfortunately, the end result did not meet expectations for the following reasons:

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An inappropriate design compromised the installation.

Licences that had been paid for were missing.

The project required deeper Symantec-centric skills than the company could directly provide.

Realising what was at stake, the IT company called on external assistance.

Email: info@esdebe.com Tel: +44 (0) 845 686 9600 www.esdebe.com

The Solution “We saw three technical consultants; however, when we met Andy of Esdebe, we were filled with confidence because he’s clearly extremely technically knowledgeable. Consequently, he came in and put everything right so everything functioned as it was originally supposed to.

“We were impressed by his honesty. He didn’t try and make a meal out of things; he only fixed the things that needed to be fixed,” commented Shaun Taylor, Enterprise Infrastructure Engineer at Kent County Council.

The Results “99% of our data is on NetBackup, the remaining 1% will soon become obsolete and be discarded.

Although we’ve added a few media servers, we haven’t had to change anything because the new design now scales perfectly.

“Our backup speed has massively increased and is easy to administer, so we need fewer people, even though it’s grown from 800 to 13,500 jobs per night,” explained Shaun.

Ongoing hardware and software costs have been dramatically reduced. For example, Kent County Council was previously paying for licences to run the four primary applications and having to provide more than 50 backup tapes a day.

“We’re now providing a much better service, for less money. If it wasn’t for Esdebe, we’d need to spend much more time and money putting things right or face huge problems further down the line,” warned Shaun.

“We recently underwent a substantial upgrade: Veritas Cluster Servers, Storage Foundation HA and NetBackup. We planned to complete the project in five days, which was extremely realistic – it would have taken much longer in-house. Andy completed it in three, because he’d seen all the issues that arose before and knew how to overcome them. This left time to carry out some extra improvements for us. Esdebe is an incredibly honest company and invoiced us for less than originally planned.

“Esdebe knows our set-up, which always gives us a head start on projects. They always follow up after completion to check that everything’s working properly and, if we have any questions, they are always available to us via the phone. We never feel as though we have to deal with issues or queries alone,” concluded Shaun.

Email: info@esdebe.com Tel: +44 (0) 845 686 9600 www.esdebe.com