Business issues
Managing Data Somerset County Council provides service and support that touches all aspects of daily life. With increasing application development and general growth in activity, data storage requirements began to rise and the Council reached a point where its server attached storage was becoming more and more difficult to manage. The Council found that departmental data storage requirement growth meant that it was impossible to properly monitor, predict and manage change. Servers ran out of capacity, back-ups had to run on to multiple tapes and the overall costs were rising at an unacceptable rate under the existing LAN infrastructure.

Solutions
The Council’s installation now includes SAN and data management applications and a full suite of Legato Networker software. As part of the agreement StorageTek provides ongoing technical support for the Council. Other components supplied by StorageTek include a StorageTek D280 disk system and associated software, a StorageTek L180 tape library and two Silkworm 3900s from Brocade and Emulex HBAs plus cables.

Business benefits
By adopting an information lifecycle management approach the total cost of IT spending can be reduced. StorageTek has successfully implemented a sustainable storage management strategy, which supports the Council and enables it to focus upon meeting and exceeding its business objectives. --Centralized management of data storage --Consolidated server infrastructure --Reduced operational costs