South Yorkshire Police has said it is on track to save
£1.1m in storage costs over five years by using a range of systems
from supplier EMC.
The police force, which renewed its contract with EMC in November
2004, has seen information from its IT systems rise by 20% every
year. It also aims to reduce back-up and recovery times for
systems.
Organisations in all sectors are spending more on storage
technology as they struggle to cope with increasing amounts of data
produced by IT systems. Two-thirds of UK organisations put storage
in their top five IT priorities, according to the annual Computer
Weekly/Posetiv survey of data storage use, published last
year.
Roy France, IT manager at South Yorkshire Police, said, "By
reducing unscheduled system downtime, streamlining the cost of
storage management and maintenance, reducing server investment and
accelerating appli-cation testing and development, South Yorkshire
Police is on track to save £1.1m between 2001 and 2006.
The force is using an EMC NS 700 storage device attached to the
network, and plans to install another system called Centera. This
allows files to identified by their contents, or by a part of their
contents, rather than by their names or positions.
France added that the force plans to use another product from EMC,
Replistor, for copying data and keeping a central record of data
from 23 locations.
"Information growth is coming from all parts of the organisation
from crime management systems and operational intelligence, to
e-mail and back-office applications," France said. "The increasing
volume of data, the massive demand for IT in the force and growing
regulatory issues, such as the Freedom of Information Act, require
us to improve our information management strategy."
Recorded crime is captured, analysed, disseminated and shared
electronically. Compliance legislation demands that the information
be stored for longer periods and electronic imaging for documents,
voice recordings and vehicle number plate recognition will soon
become standard.