Conwy County Borough Council has replaced old storage technology with a storage area network (San) as the basis of an IT overhaul.

The 3.2TB system, supplied by Hitachi and Viglen, is helping the council handle a major IT upgrade of email, archiving, payroll, human resources and exchange applications.

Enid Roberts, Conwy’s IT support manager, says the San allows the council to deliver better services to its 2,000 citizens.

‘The benefit for the people in the area is that when they talk to the council, local authority employees will have the information they require available when and where they require it,’ she said.

Conwy expects the new San system to last for at least five years, and has already used it to create a central email repository, replacing the previous system of on-computer storage that was prone to loss and deletion.

‘Some computers had over a gigabyte of email records on them,’ said Roberts.
There are also plans for future projects using the new system, including a social care and housing package and the installation of Unix on a number of the council’s servers.

As well as improving operational efficiency, the San has also saved the council a lot of space.

‘We were in a position where we had to buy direct storage for all of our servers, which was proving increasingly difficult as the systems became more and more space hungry,’ said Roberts.

For every server Conwy purchased, it also had to buy a hard disk rack that doubled the space needed in the computer room for every new system. And each server had to have its own duplicate for back-up and disaster recovery, according to Roberts.

‘Instead we now have one for the whole of the computer room, and we can now look into other new technologies, such as blade servers,’ she said.