Birmingham City Council is set to reject a cloud solution for back-up infrastructure for its core ICT, proposing instead to spend £1.3m upgrading its existing data centres.
Birmingham City Council is set to reject a cloud solution for back-up infrastructure for its core ICT, proposing instead to spend £1.3m upgrading its existing data centres.
A report due to be considered by the council’s cabinet next week says that the current infrastructure has been in place since 2008 and is increasingly at risk from being unable to cope with the amount of new data being created.
Its proposed solution, recommended by its ICT joint venture with Capita, Service Birmingham, would retain and refresh equipment based at three existing data centres, which back up data.
The report said: “Service Birmingham have reviewed the options on behalf of the Council, including moving the back up infrastructure to cloud based technology and have concluded that to ensure the security, performance and stability of the council’s core ICT infrastructure the proposed multiple data centre solution provides the optimal solution.”
In the event of a failure of a business critical live application the back up infrastructure is used to restore any services that are lost, thereby maximising business continuity.
The cost of the proposal is £1,325,000 including prudential borrowing costs, and revenue costs of ongoing support and maintenance are contained within the costs of the existing system will not lead to an increase.
The refresh of hardware and software at each of the data centres will include V7000 replacement servers and upgrades, capacity, cluster and replication software, 1 petabyte of storage, implementation of IBM ProtecTIER Virtual Tape Library Solution, as well as testing and launching costs.
The project is dependent on the approval of the full business case, the approval of prudential borrowing and the placing of orders with Service Birmingham.
Separately, the cabinet meeting is also being asked to approve the full business case relating to the migration to Windows Server 2008 operating system for the Council’s Wintel server estate.
A separate report on this issue said: “The key benefit of the project is maintaining the security of the Councils ICT infrastructure beyond July 2015, at which point the Windows Server 2003 operating system will no longer be supported by Microsoft.”
The cabinet will be asked to approve prudential borrowing over five years to the tune of £3.6 million to pay for this upgrade, along with £155,000 for support costs over six years, funded from corporate core ICT budgets. It will be carried out by Service Birmingham.
Service Birmingham has conclude that the majority of corporate business-critical applications will successfully migrate to the new system.
However, the report added: “The limited number of applications which cannot be migrated to the Windows Server 2008 operating system will be identified early in the implementation, giving directorates a long lead time to discuss the potential options available to them.”
