Managed Service & Virtualization at Bournemouth Council boosts service levels to 97% - 100%
Bournemouth Borough Council deployed Allied's Managed Service Solution to consolidate their infrastructure into a flexible, highly utilised set of virtual resources, while reducing storage and administrative cost.
About our Client
Bournemouth Borough Council is responsible for providing the local community with a usable and
accessible library service. Bournemouth Library is the largest provider of services for the 164,600
residents of Bournemouth and is responsible for delivering a wide range of social services and
ensuring ongoing economic development.
The Scenario
As the initial 5-year PFI IT contract drew to an end, Bournemouth Council placed the full Library
IT facility out to tender again; this time for a Technology Refresh including a further 5-year term
for Managed Services. The council was seeking solutions to meet the government's "Green" and
“Gershon” initiatives and to further develop the service that had already been undertaken by Allied
Worldwide.
A variety of bid responses were accepted, as the council wanted to review all and any new
technologies & solutions, which might benefit the service. As the current incumbent, Allied
Worldwide also took part in the bid with strong competition, fully aware that we could not be
complacent in our solution and expect our previous success to be an advantage.
Allied Worldwide supplied one standard bid and two variant bids. Following detailed discussions,
both designs were approved and Allied won the bid in July 2007.
Business Challenge
The council needed an enhanced solution with minimum down time for all upgrades, refreshes and
new implementations, as the library facility would remain open except for standard non-work hours
during the implementation phase.
The Bournemouth Council's second round of tender included:
- New system development requirements
- Upgrades to meet the councils own internal IT plans
- Virtualization
- Meeting government green initiatives
The Solution
Allied Worldwide agreed to a phased implementation plan over 3 years and was committed to a “no
downtime” implementation, delivering the managed service as we upgraded the IT, accepting all
risk to any service failure or delay during this period.
Allied provided a solution which included a complete change to the data centre setup, moving
away from a clustered server solution and implementing a virtual server solution using VMware.
Proper design measures were taken to support server energy efficiency, which enabled a significant
reduction in energy demand.
Following VMware implementation, a backup solution was also implemented enabling disk level
backups and agent level backups for critical and important data. Additional servers with a SAN were
installed in the council data centre to provide maximum expansion over the five years, to counter
any possible data scalability issues.
Allied also upgraded the desktops, security system (firewall, anti-virus etc) and library networks to
provide the council with a new VoIP system. We also implemented a two way 'trust' for access, to
new council applications.
Conclusion
By integrating virtualization & storage solutions, we have reduced the number of servers by 70%.
Additionally, we helped our client to customise, update and deploy a greener IT infrastructure
that delivers higher levels of reliability, availability and service to end users, with a lower carbon
footprint.
Allied's solution has already provided cost savings to the council and our relationships with
suppliers has also resulted in the provision of extra services and solutions at no extra costs. The
implementation had no impact on the library service being delivered to the members of the public.
Allied Worldwide are continuously amending and upgrading the managed service using ITIL V3
based best practices, resulting in knowledge transfer to the library 1st Line Support team, through
our co-sourcing model.
Currently the service level stands at between 97% – 100%.
