The Isle of Man has transferred its entire public services IT infrastructure onto a Cloud service in a move expected to cut operating costs by 15%.
The Government of the island has contracted supplier EMC to provide a hybrid Cloud service running over 1,000 critical government applications such as email, financial accounting, customer relationship management and health services.
Implemented over five months, the new public service infrastructure has increased data availability and system performance by a factor of eight, according to EMC, while reducing operating costs by 15%. Storage utilisation has risen by 40 % - using the same amount of hardware as before - and capacity of the Government’s storage area network has tripled.
The Isle of Man has deployed an EMC VPLEX virtual storage platform with EMC Unified Storage. VPLEX analyses system usage patterns and automatically moves applications that are in-demand to flash drives for increased availability.
Demand for the Isle of Man Government's public service infrastructure varies due to factors such as seasonal tourism, shift work in government offices and annual events such as the island's famous TT motorcycle race.
Peter Clarke, Chief Technology Officer at the Isle of Man Government, explains:
Key benefits of the move include:
- Enhanced performance and reduced operating costs: Data availability and system performance has improved by eight times. Operating costs have fallen by 15%.
- Improved storage utilisation: The usage of existing storage resources has been increased by 40%, meaning that the disk pool will now only require an upgrade when it reaches 80% capacity, instead of the previous 60%.
- Automatic storage optimisation: VPLEX with Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) automatically analyses system usage patterns for improved operational efficiency.
- Data transfer to fast-access storage: In-demand applications and data are automatically moved to flash drives for increased availability, then back onto disk arrays as demand reduces.
Clarke adds:
