Overview
Country or Region: United Kingdom
Industry: Government
Customer Profile
Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service responds to emergency incidents in the county of Cheshire. It also provides community safety advice, which reduces risks at home, in the workplace, and out of doors.
Business Situation
Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service wanted a new disaster recovery strategy to help the organisation comply with the Civil Contingencies Act. It also wanted to safeguard vital data accumulated during the past 10 years.
Solution
Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service deployed a backup data centre based on Windows Server® 2008 R2, which includes Hyper-V™ virtualisation technology.
Benefits
n Reduces third-party support
n Lowers energy bills
n Reduces licensing costs
n Cuts carbon dioxide emissions / “By migrating applications onto virtualised servers we expect to save approximately 80 per cent on third-party support.”
Steve Binnie, Network Administrator, Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service
The IT team at Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service wanted to ensure continued compliance with the United Kingdom (U.K.) government’s Civil Contingencies Act and roll out a new disaster recovery data centre. By deploying the Windows Server® 2008 R2 operating system and Hyper-V™ virtualisation technology, the team has not only achieved this goal, but it also expects to reduce hardware support costs by 80 per cent, cut server electricity costs by 77 per cent, and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 36 tonnes. In addition, the team no longer needs to acquire specialist virtualisation software because all of the core functionality that it needs is supplied by Hyper-V. What’s more, the licensing arrangements for Windows Server 2008 R2 help ensure that one licence covers multiple virtual machines running on a single physical server.
Situation
One of the most important goals of the United Kingdom (U.K.) Civil Contingencies Act is ensuring that emergency services establish proven business continuity plans for all their operations. This is especially critical for IT teams in the National Health Service, the police force, and the fire and rescue service, which must prove they can continue to respond to emergencies even if primary systems fail.
Although Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service already had processes in place, it was keen to improve its existing arrangements. Steve Binnie, Network Administrator, Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service, explains: “If we had suffered IT failure we could have continued to function using mobile phones and fixed lines. But in recent years, we’ve started to analyse incident information and other data that we use to inform and educate the public to help prevent accidents and fires from happening. How to protect this data was a new challenge for us.”
Much of this new data is derived from activities carried out by Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service as part of its Home Fire Safety Check initiative. This involves working with businesses and private households to identify and eliminate risks to safety. “We deal with thousands of individuals and buildings every year and we record this information at our data centre,” says Binnie.
As well as using this data to report to government and prove that it has met its targets, the team also records incidents in an attempt to establish patterns of risk and deploy resources appropriately. “Our key goal is to make Cheshire safer and our increasingly sophisticated data analysis means we are able to target areas and people most at risk and limit the chance of emergencies occurring in the future,” says Binnie.
With approximately 10 years’ worth of data in storage, Binnie and his colleagues sought funding for a backup data centre. “We believed that a combination of virtualisation and storage area network (SAN) technology could deliver what we needed. But first we had to research the market to find the right combination of value, reliability, and scalability,” he says.
Solution
The answer to this challenge became apparent in early 2009 when the service’s technology partner Nviron made Binnie aware of Windows Server® 2008 R2. The latest version of the operating system includes Hyper-V™ technology as standard, removing the main barrier to widespread deployment of virtualised systems. “We initially considered VMware,” says Binnie. “But when we looked at the functionality of Windows Server 2008 R2—especially the Live Migration feature—we realised we were getting all the core functionality of third-party virtualisation software that we needed under our operating system licence.”
Both Nviron, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, and Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service were impressed by the Windows PowerShell™ command-line interface in Windows Server 2008 R2, which IT professionals use to define automatic processes. Binnie says: “We will be able to specify which virtual servers are started at the disaster recovery site and also the exact order that they come online. This ensures that failover to the second site is managed coherently and that normal operations are resumed quickly.”
Two Microsoft System Center products play a vital role here. Firstly, Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, which Binnie and his team use to configure and deploy virtual machines and centrally manage physical and virtual infrastructures from one console. It also helps with day-to-day management of clusters. “With System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 we can assess the performance of virtualised servers and fix any issues before they become significant problems,” says Binnie.
Secondly, Nviron recommended Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 for backup and recovery. Kieron Connolly, Business Development Manager at Nviron, says: “It means we can provide continuous data protection for Microsoft application and file servers using seamlessly integrated disk and tape media. It also offers rapid and reliable recovery.”
In addition, Nviron used the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP) to determine which of the existing servers in the main data centre were suitable for virtualization, aside from the five machines that were already configured under the original release of Hyper-V. Connolly says: “The last thing you want to do is retire servers that are perfectly capable of running in a virtualised environment. MAP helps us to identify underutilised resources and the hardware specifications needed to successfully consolidate the servers using Hyper-V technology.”
Working with Nviron, Binnie and his team tested the technology by connecting two servers running Windows Server 2008 R2 with a SAN running across a 100 megabits-per-second connection. Following the test, Binnie and his colleagues at Nviron hope to deploy a five-node cluster of new servers, each of which can run about 10 virtual machines. He also expects to consolidate about 30 physical servers at the existing data centre to about 17 physical machines. He says: “Not every application can be virtualised, but we hope to reduce our hardware significantly.”
Benefits
The deployment of Microsoft virtualisation technology provides Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service with a clear roadmap for better compliance with the Civil Contingencies Act, as well as an opportunity to reduce hardware and energy costs. Binnie says: “Thanks to Windows Server 2008 R2, we can deploy a disaster recovery system that meets the exact needs of the Civil Contingencies Act.”
Reduces Third-Party Support Contracts by 80 Per Cent
One important area where Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service expects to make savings is by reducing the cost of its third-party hardware support contracts. The organisation currently runs a number of servers, including ones from IBM and HP. As the number of these machines diminishes during the virtualisation process, the cost of maintenance is expected to fall significantly. Binnie says: “Today we have a hardware estate of around 30 servers, all of which come with their own support contracts. By migrating applications onto virtualised servers we expect to save approximately 80 per cent on third-party support.”
Lowers IT Energy Bills by 77 Per Cent
The fall in the number of physical servers will help the Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service IT team reduce power consumption. “The figures are impressive and make a compelling case for virtualisation,” says Binnie. He makes his calculation comparing a backup data centre with 30 physical machines, corresponding to the main site’s original hardware estate, with a much smaller number of five machines in the new infrastructure. “Deploying five virtualised physical servers in the backup site—rather than up to 30 servers—lowers energy consumption by 77 per cent,” he says.
Reduces Licensing Costs
Binnie is extremely pleased with the licensing arrangements for virtualised machines running Windows Server 2008 R2. Put simply, one licence covers one physical machine running Windows Server 2008 R2, but a systems administrator can run as many virtual machines as required on that server. “We get all the virtualisation functionality that we need with our Microsoft server licences. There’s no need to pay for additional software on top of that,” he says.
Cuts Carbon Dioxide Emissions by 36 Tonnes
The U.K. public sector is under extreme pressure to shrink its carbon footprint. The U.K. government has pledged to reduce carbon dioxide from its own buildings and transport by 12.5 per cent by 2012 compared with 1999 levels. “Hyper-V plays a central role in helping us meet this target,” says Binnie. “A consequence of cutting back on the number of servers and overall power consumption is that we will bring down our annual carbon dioxide emissions by around 36 tonnes.”
Windows Server 2008 R2
Windows Server 2008 R2 is the latest version of the Windows Server operating system from Microsoft. With Windows Server 2008 R2, you can create solutions that are easier to plan, deploy, and manage than with previous versions of Windows Server. Building on the features, security, reliability, and performance provided by Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 extends connectivity and control to local and remote resources. This means that your organisation can benefit from reduced costs and increased efficiencies gained through enhanced management and control over resources across the enterprise.
For more information, go to
www.microsoft.com/WindowsServer2008R2