Three Welsh councils have joined together to build a new
disaster recovery site to save money on the badly needed
operation.
Cardiff, Carmarthenshire and Wrexham have installed disaster
recovery platforms from Sun Microsystems and chosen technical
support from Fujitsu Services to help run the operation, which
covers e-mail, revenues, benefits, social care, libraries and many
others.
The councils said they would not have been able to afford the
level of disaster recovery they now have without joining forces.
Previously, all three councils did not have all their main
operations covered by a disaster recovery facility that could
provide an alternative data processing platform.
Cardiff for example, when faced with an outage, could previously
only make emergency housing benefit payments but could not carry on
processing new benefit claims - now it can.
Crispin O'Connell, chief ICT officer at Cardiff, said, "This
deal not only provides a great opportunity for Cardiff but also for
the other participating councils.
"The infrastructure has been designed in such a way that other
councils within Wales could also use our disaster recovery
centre."
The councils link into the site using the Welsh Assembly’s Wales
Lifelong Learning Network that already connects to the 22 Welsh
councils. Each of the three participating councils has a 100mbps
connection to the disaster recovery site via this network, and the
same connection could be used by additional councils joining the
scheme.
O’Connell admitted that the back-up platform could only support
continued processing of data for no more than one of the three
councils if more than one experienced difficulties. But he said
Cardiff was previously faced with a similar problem when having to
join a queue for disaster recovery facilities behind other
customers of its previous provider.
All three councils were already using Sun-based platforms so
their partnership was relatively easy to achieve. If other councils
joined the scheme extra hardware would have to be added to the
central site, and non-Sun users would find it more difficult to
join the scheme.
The disaster recovery centre, based in Cardiff, is due to go
live in August and will house seven Sun Fire V440 servers and one
Sun Fire V480 server, a Sun StorEdge 6320 system and a Sun StorEdge
L180 tape library for the centre's recovery framework.
Sun and Fujitsu have signed a four-year deal with the councils.
The cost of the disaster recovery site has not been revealed.
Charles Andrews, director of public sector sales at Sun, said,
"Local government as a whole is looking to exploit economies of
scale and get real value for money, whilst making sure business
targets are met. Shared services between councils has to be the
best way of achieving this."