THE Isle of Man government's entire public service IT infrastructure has been moved onto a hybrid cloud service, providing shared access anywhere, including over 1,000 critical government applications such as email, financial accounting, customer relationship management and health services.
The government’s Information Systems Division (ISD) said the initiative was designed to provide a more efficient, flexible and reliable delivery of its public services. The cost has not been disclosed.
The Isle of Man has deployed a combination of the EMC Corporation’s VPLEX virtual storage platform – which allows organisations to “federate information across multiple data centres and access it from anywhere – with EMC Unified Storage”.
Peter Clarke, the government’s chief technology officer said, "The Isle of Man Government is an early adopter of new technologies, and our analysis indicated that VPLEX would reduce operating costs by 15 %. We wrote our business plan around this. It was a compelling argument.
“Having recognised that VPLEX could further increase service levels while reducing IT costs, we made the decision to purchase – and we are delighted to have realised the projected benefits, and more."
He added, "By virtualising our entire server platform and all service applications, the Isle of Man Government has significantly increased service levels as well as data flexibility and availability. In the case of the health service, this means individual patient records are now aggregated and appropriate information made instantly available to doctors, EMT specialists, ambulance technicians, surgeons, nurses and other authorised users."
Demand for the Isle of Man government's public service infrastructure varies regularly due to factors such as tourism seasonality, shift work in government offices and annual events such as the TT races.
The government's legacy system was disk-based and tiered in three layers. Previously, when demand for certain applications and data increased, the ISD would have to manually assign each to a higher tier level.
Now VPLEX Metro, with EMC's industry-leading FAST technology, analyses system usage patterns and automatically moves in-demand applications to flash drives for increased availability. As demand falls back, the relevant assets are moved back onto fibre channel disk drives.
Implemented over five months, the new public service infrastructure has increased data availability and system performance by a factor of eight, while operating costs have reduced by 15 per cent.
Storage utilisation has risen by 40 % – using the same amount of hardware as before – and capacity of the government's storage area network has tripled. In addition, VPLEX has improved system flexibility by allowing the Isle of Man government to transfer services from one data centre to another in real time.
