Cardiff Council is the largest council in Wales, employing about 18,000 staff and providing services to more than 320,000 residents, with data volumes that reflect the organisation’s size and remit.

The council decided to centralise its IT and corporate applications data and relocated its servers to County Hall to improve efficiency. However, the organisation aimed to make the move gradually and therefore needed flexible storage technology to support the process.

“The council has experienced a data explosion because of increasing email activity and we needed to increase our storage,” says Erik Williams, network servers manager at the council.

“There were problems with individual servers having individual databases and we looked at centralising applications, but we wanted a reliable and fast storage system which was expandable in the gigabit range.”

Williams looked at storage area network (SAN) technology, but network backup costs put the system beyond the council’s budget and he instead opted for network attached storage (NAS) from NetApp.

“We liked the flexibility of being able to go up in chunks of storage capacity and now have plans to put in 32 terabytes of storage, up from from our current 16 terabytes, but we can increase it in stages to manage costs,” says Williams.

“Some of the SAN systems were cheaper to buy but annual renewal costs were 18 to 22 per cent of the purchase price. As a council with a budget to manage, we prefer capital outlay upfront so we know where we are.”

The NetApp NAS stores the council’s core business applications data from Oracle and its Microsoft Exchange environment. The council is migrating data from its Microsoft SQL database to the storage platform.

Williams says one of the biggest benefits is reducing daily backup times for Exchange. “Previously it would take 18 hours to back up the whole Exchange system ­ now it takes just 20 minutes,” he says.

Disaster recovery has also improved as County Hall’s NetApp storage system is mirrored to another system three miles away at City Hall, connected via a 100 Mbit/s link.

“By mirroring to the second site at City Hall, we have reduced the risk to corporate data by increasing resilience,” says Williams.

Centralising corporate data has also helped create a virtual file manager environment, so users can find the data they need quickly without worrying about the server or database location.

“Users do not want to have to know where a file comes from or go to a particular server to find it, and NetApp helps us achieve that,” says Williams.

In the future, Cardiff Council plans to use NetApp to help manage the storage burden presented by its SAP data warehouse, which is run separately from the other corporate databases.