GlassHouse Technologies, the leading independent IT infrastructure consulting and services firm, has developed a storage strategy for Fife Council that will simplify its storage management, enabling a more efficient and effective way to store, protect and access its data.
Fife Council is the third largest authority in Scotland responsible for delivering all local government services in the region. With a team of over 22,000 people delivering more than 900 individual services to the people of Fife each year, the council manages a number of systems that control everything from payroll to the electoral role.
Fife Council recognised that it was holding a significant amount of dispersed data in five centres, maintained under different policies and procedures, with varying levels of access and availability. The current state of the system meant it was time consuming and difficult for staff to access the information required and in the event of a disaster, the data would have been very difficult to recover.
“We acknowledged that we needed a coherent long term storage strategy for the data the council holds. We needed the data to be consolidated to enable centralised management and guaranteed backup and protection against disaster, at the same time having a consistently high level of access. We enlisted the help of GlassHouse to work with us to create a five year strategy to meet our needs and requirements,” said Roddy Cameron, Technical Consultant, Fife Council.
“After assessing the storage environment at Fife Council, it was clear that the solution required would encompass all storage requirements, including disaster recovery, backup and a consistent archive policy across the whole organisation,” said Jim Spooner, Strategy Services Manager for GlassHouse. “Our role was to help Fife council develop an effective and appropriate storage strategy through careful identification and evaluation of the technology and services required, then to create an RFP to source a vendor to implement the strategy.”
GlassHouse advised Fife Council to implement a tiered storage strategy and proposed that data be split across two sites in the event of a disaster. GlassHouse also provided a service catalogue which facilitated the alignment of applications and data depending on the different storage tiers. As a result, the Council will be able to deliver storage as an ongoing service as opposed to deploying point solutions on a case by case basis. The service catalogue is supported by a reference technical architecture which allows the Council to continuously evaluate the storage provision.
The evaluation and realignment of Fife Council’s storage strategy will result in the Council having a more controlled storage environment and will ultimately help to enhance the business continuity of the organisation.
“We were extremely impressed with the high level of consultancy we received from GlassHouse for this project. GlassHouse has been instrumental in changing how Fife Council manages its storage provision, helping to make the Council much more efficient,” said Roddy Cameron, Technical Consultant, Fife Council.
In total, GlassHouse consultants spent a month on site at Fife Council interviewing and conducting workshops with key staff to gather a variety of infrastructure data and gain understanding of the required needs to compile the storage strategy document.
“With our technology independence and experienced consultants, we are able to focus on providing strategic plans to ensure that a company’s IT infrastructure is effective and scalable. GlassHouse is well-positioned to identify the technology and services required that will deliver a more efficient and cost-effective storage service provider model,” said Jim Spooner, Strategy Service Team Leader for GlassHouse.
About GlassHouse
GlassHouse Technologies is a global provider of IT infrastructure services enabling organisations to consolidate, virtualise and manage their IT environments. GlassHouse delivers services through TransomSM, a unique delivery framework comprised of proprietary software tools, methodologies and domain expertise. We reduce costs, decrease risk and improve service levels by providing measurable results and vendor independent solutions. GlassHouse focuses on the storage/data protection, virtualisation and data centre markets.
