Sports council cuts hassle with blades

The Sports Council for Wales has replaced ageing server and storage infrastructure and improved its disaster recovery capability to boot.

The organisation, with 200 staff, is responsible for developing and promoting sport in Wales, including distributing lottery funds to sport.

IT manager at the Sports Council for Wales, Simon Napper, told silicon.com: "The hardware we had was coming to the end of its useful life and it was getting harder for the support company to find spares, especially for the network attached storage."

It has updated its infrastructure by replacing a number of out-dated servers - which ran some of its critical system and databases - with 12 Fujitsu blade servers. It has also replaced its old direct-attached storage in the deal with storage integrator B2net, which completed the project in February.

"One of the main reasons for looking at blade servers was that we've got a small server room and we wanted something that was compact and scaleable. One of the other benefits is standardisation," Napper explained.

The new system means the council's IT team has more control over its storage environment, and can allocate extra storage to new projects when they need them - rather than having to contact the hardware supplier for extra server storage.

The organisation is moving its key applications over to the new infrastructure, including Exchange, Oracle and its HR system.

Napper said: "In terms of the end user there hasn't been a huge impact. We were able to migrate according to our own schedule so we didn't have to impact them. We've migrated most of our applications over to the new hardware."

The new infrastructure has also boosted disaster recovery so that the council's IT staff can now recover an application in an hour and a half, compared to 24-48 hours before, Napper said.