Trafford Council
From legacy systems to hybrid cloud: Trafford Council dramatically cuts hypervisor licensing requirements and retires its disaster recovery datacentre.
Trafford Council is the local authority for the Metropolitan Borough of Trafford in Greater Manchester. Its small but skilled IT team supports the Council’s 2,300+ users, in addition to maintaining the digital infrastructure upon which the majority of the Council’s citizen-facing services relies.
Key facts
- Sector: Local Government
- Staff supported: 2,300+ users
- ICT team size: 10 members in the Technology Team
- Devices: 2,300 end-user devices, 258 VMs, 6 hosts, 135 TB storage
- Solutions: Dell PowerStore 1200T, PowerEdge R660, Veeam secure backup
Trafford Council was facing mounting pressure to refresh its ageing infrastructure as support contracts were coming to an end. Its compute servers, based on Cisco and NetApp, were reaching end-of-life and struggling to handle current workloads.
The architecture was deemed to be overly complex, with high CPU and memory utilisation across 13 hosts in production, in addition to a secondary site for Disaster Recovery (DR). Licensing costs were also escalating.
The council needed a modern, cost-effective solution that could make the most of its existing software investments, provide a more performant DR solution, while enabling a low-risk path to the cloud.
Phoenix’s consultative approach ensured the solution was designed around Trafford’s needs, not a pre-packaged offering.
Phoenix proposed a tailored infrastructure refresh based on the traditional 3 tier approach (network, compute and storage), consolidating Trafford’s environment from 16 to 6 hosts, while delivering exceptional performance gains across its 258 VMs. The secondary DR datacentre would be decommissioned and a new backup appliance installed to remove unnecessary workloads from the production system
Extra attention was paid to optimisation of the Council’s hypervisor costs. While alternative hypervisors were considered, the council preferred to maintain its existing solution due to its ongoing licensing commitments and the team’s familiarity with the platform. Phoenix was able to design a much more efficient solution that not only reduced the total number of CPUs, but also took account of licensing core-count efficiencies to reduce the council’s VM licensing requirements significantly.
The overall technical solution consisted of:
- Dell PowerStore 1200T & PowerEdge R660s with dual 16-core Intel CPUs
- Immutable Veeam repository on PowerEdge R760xd2 for secure backups
- All-flash storage with high data reduction ratios, displacing NetApp
- Unified compute and storage management from a single vendor
Benefits (outcomes)
by significantly reducing CPU core count.
reducing power and operational costs.
with peak CPU usage dropping from 100% to 64%.
enabling more of the IT team to support the environment.
with a clear path to cloud migration via Azure.
due to a newer, more powerful, stable, supported infrastructure.
Looking to modernise your infrastructure while reducing costs and complexity?
Contact Phoenix Software today to explore how we can tailor a solution to your needs.