Our Customer
As the initial five-year PFI contract for IT services for Bournemouth Library drew to a close, Bournemouth Borough Council was required to put the contract back out to tender. Allied was the existing supplier and, after participating in a highly competitive bid process, won the new contract to deliver a complete technology refresh for the library. Key factors included government environmental and ‘Gershon’ procurement efficiency initiatives. In a separate contract that ran concurrently, Allied was also appointed to provide fully managed IT services to the library network for five years.
Objectives
Through the project Allied aimed to deliver:
- Technology refresh for Bournemouth’s library, serving approximately 165,000 residents
- Improved library technology infrastructure to deliver enhanced service levels for end users
- Reliability and resilience with a fail-safe backup and recovery solution, and scope for expansion
- Reduced costs, especially in respect of datacentre power consumption
Solution
Allied’s tailored service offer to Bournemouth Borough Council included:
- VMware cloud server infrastructure in off-site datacentre – replacing the existing Allied server-based solution
- Comprehensive datacentre backup capabilities, enabling disk-level and agent-level backups
- Additional servers on-premises at the council offices to provide further capacity for expansion
- Storage area networking (SAN) to connect council office and datacentre IT resources
- Upgrades to in-library IT assets, including desktop PCs, network and security infrastructure
- The implementation of a new VoIP communications system at the library
Benefits
After successful implementation, Allied managed to achieve:
- Major financial and environmental gains from the reduced power demands of 70% fewer servers
- Further cost savings achieved through Allied managing third party supplier relationships
- More reliable, highly available IT infrastructure, delivering improved service to the library’s end users (>97% performance against SLA on average)
- Strong compliance with environmental and ‘Gershon’ efficiency initiatives
Keys to success
Through the project, Allied and Bournemouth Borough Council have achieved:
- Reliability and resilience – With a fail-safe backup and recovery solution, and scope for expansion
- Continuous improvements – Allied continuously amends and upgrades the managed service using ITIL v3-based best practices.
- Business as usual – Allied had to minimise downtime during implementation as all library facilities would remain fully open.
