Warwick District Council is to improve its back-up and recovery capabilities and cut costs by upgrading storage systems and installing virtualisation technology.

The council has increased data back-up speeds and improved disaster recovery using HP technology to handle growing amounts of data in the event of the ground-floor IT operations site being flooded.

Warwick has moved HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array 3000 (EVA3000) from the ground floor to the third floor, while a higher capacity EVA5000 has been installed on the ground floor with a fibre channel linking the two.

It now plans to run VMware ESX Server software – which abstracts processor, memory, storage and networking resources into multiple virtual machines – on HP blade servers that will be centrally managed using VMware VirtualCenter.

At the same time the council plans to upgrade its storage area network.

‘Our maintenance contract is due for renewal and it costs £30,000 a year to maintain the EVA5000,’ said Richard Bates, infrastructure manager at Warwick District Council. ‘The EVA6000 costs £75,000 so it makes sense to upgrade.’

‘We will centrally manage everything with VMware and it will cut the cost of computing in terms of power,’ he said.