Council signs £7.2m deal to support strategic plan

Contract part of plans to move to on-demand group computing

South Lanarkshire Council has awarded a £7.2m deal to Computacenter for a backbone server and storage system.

The deal, which includes supply, support and disaster recovery provisions, will replace the current contract the council has with HP which is soon to expire.

Robin Miller, IT strategy and standards manager for South Lanarkshire Council, says the contract is part of a longer-term strategic plan to move to an on-demand group computing environment to increase its storage capacity.

‘We are looking to try not to increase the number of servers we have, but to use growth in power, storage and virtualisation to expand capacity,’ he said.

‘In fact, we are actually looking for a reduction in the number of servers we use, though if this proves not to be possible, we have a secondary plan to use spare capacity for disaster recovery and business continuity purposes.’

South Lanarkshire is looking to the future on-demand system to help handle as much of its storage needs as possible, and reduce the longer-term costs of ownership for its IT equipment.

As well as furthering the council’s strategic IT goals, the new servers will also help the council meet growing national requirements for improvements to local services, such as noise prevention and waste disposal, says Miller.

‘The Scottish Executive’s policies mean that all council departments are looking for new ways to interact with citizens, and more often than not, those communications processes require an IT solution, placing increasing demands on our server and storage systems,’ he said.

The council is in the final stages of negotiating the details of the deal.