Kent
Policehave bought a £120,000
EqualLogic storage area network fromInfrasysto manage "exponential growth" of the force's data storage
needs. Not only is it saving incremental costs now, but the force
expects the system to pay for itself within five
years.
Infrasys secured the business through the
Office of Government Commerce Catalist framework supplier
Probrand.
Kent Police is using the 30 terabyte installation as back-up. It
may go on to use the technology to store live data on its
operational systems as part of a wider virtualisation
programme.
Project manager Jon Edwards-Moss said 6,000-user Kent Police
began evaluating its future storage needs in late 2005. This showed
"frightening exponential growth that our present technology could
not have coped with", he said.
The subsequent comprehensive market review and evaluation of
available technologies and applications led to the purchase
decision in November 2006. The delay was to our advantage because
costs dropped, said Edwards-Moss. "Even now we still have not
implemented everything we want to."
Edwards-Moss added that new business requirements drove the
increase in demand for storage. "We need to retain data such as
e-mails to respond to
Freedom of Information requests. This is driving a lot of the
demand, but there are new databases and big new systems with more
users too."
The new systems include expansion of automatic number plate
recognition systems and closed circuit video. These follow last
month's London and Glasgow car bombs.
More sharing of data will also affect storage needs. "We have
not scoped it yet, but that will come in time," said Ian Robinson,
Kent Police's technical manager.
Kent Police hopes the new San will reduce its dependency on tape
storage. However, that may need changes to the regulations that
govern archive material.
Kent Police presently has seven servers of its more than 200
physical servers attached to the San.
Edwards-Moss said performance was better than expected, "It ran
pretty much out of the box, transfer speeds are equivalent to
locally-attached storage, scalability is built-in, there are no
restrictions on cable lengths compared to traditional
physically-attached storage, meaning that, bandwidth permitting, we
can site units wherever we like."
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