About the client
The City of Bayside is a local government area in Victoria, Australia. It is within the southern suburbs of Melbourne. It has an area of 36 square kilometres and in 2016 had a population of 97,087 people. It was created in December 1994 as a new municipality comprising the former City of Brighton, the former City of Sandringham and part of the former City of Mordialloc west of Charman Road and part of the City of Moorabbin between the railway and Charman Road.
Bayside was rated eighth of 590 Australian Local Government Areas in the BankWest Quality of Life Index 2008. The Council’s purpose is to work with the community to make Bayside a better place. By setting out their commitments and establishing what they need to do to address them, they expect to achieve this.
The project
The Council Plan is to deliver an unprecedented capital works program to upgrade, expand, and renew existing infrastructure and community services. To be able to meet these plans, the Council needed IT infrastructure that was robust, secure, scalable, and flexible and to be able to work seamlessly.
The legacy systems were:
Complex, with multiple disparate systemsCostly to maintain, with regular intervention from external vendors just to keep them runningUnable to meet some of the Council’s core compliance requirements around disaster recovery and securityOut of date and out of support
The project set out to completely replace 6-year-old infrastructure.
Highlights of the new infrastructure include:
Using HPE Nimble all-flash storage for production delivering high-performance and low latency to virtualised applications with built-in snapshot and replications capabilitiesUsing HPE Nimble adaptive flash for DR for near all-flash performanceA converged on-premise data centre solution, with a virtual Infrastructure platform running VMware vSphere 6.5 hypervisor with 100% virtualised workload Veeam application-aware backups to an HPE StoreOnce disk backup target for 12 months of disk-based backup with object-level recoveryNew core network and stretch VLANs between the production and DR sites VMware SRM to automate DR failover, fallback and testingStorage-level, application-aware replication which can be enabled for workloads from both sitesLong-term backups and archives older than 1 year are stored in a public cloud.
How Onel worked with the client
Bayside issued a public tender, with many vendors responding. However, “the presentation that Onel submitted was a ‘stand out’. It highlighted what Onel could offer. They clearly had the products to meet our requirements, but they also demonstrated that they had the support capability and technical knowledge to give us confidence that they could execute a complete overhaul of our environment,” said Kathryn Tozer, Manager, Information Services at Bayside City Council.
“Onel’s planning and response times have been exceptional. Their knowledge and implementation skills were great. The overall performance of our systems has vastly improved, It’s faster, reliable and the up-time is terrific.”
The outcome and benefits
Remarkably, the cutover from Bayside’s 6-year-old infrastructure to running on the new infrastructure, only required 4 to 5 minutes of downtime. The new solution is a converged on-premise data centre implementation. “I was undecided about fully cloud or on premise but after exhaustive research and risk analysis, I’m pleased that we implemented private cloud infrastructure on-premise – you have a guarantee that it’s your infrastructure, up time, greater security and in an ever changing software environment, an easier option for integrations. If something goes wrong, you’re not logging a ticket and hoping for a good response time from a cloud vendor. We basically have a private cloud data centre on-site, and another one for DR in another location. Having your data on your own infrastructure on your premises can’t be over-rated.”
Kathryn was delighted by comments from auditors following a recent internal audit with regard to our new Disaster Recover Solution. “They said we were a sector leader in terms of our Disaster Recovery setup and were impressed by our infrastructure and recovery times.
“We now have a robust, secure & scalable platform with full visibility of our environment via cloud proactive monitoring and simplicity of infrastructure, all with a single support number” said Kathryn.
The platforms are so stable and reliable that the Bayside IT team are now able to focus on business innovation projects instead of day-to-day maintenance tasks. With the environment working so reliably and seamlessly, IT are now able to meet the objectives of the Council’s transformation project. Bayside is moving into data warehouse applications with the objective of providing statistics and analytics on their customers helping them to engage proactively with their community rather than reactively. The extremely high performance of the HPE Nimble all-flash storage is enabling such data-intensive workloads.
What the client said
Kathryn Tozer is very pleased with the relationship that Bayside has with Onel.
“They are not a ‘drop and run’ organisation. They are beyond a sale, it’s a solution with support for the life of the contract. We can call them at any time and they’ll respond promptly. We’ve had a couple of outages and I have been very impressed with the response and resolution times. Onel’s implementation of the project and after support has been fantastic.”