IBM has announced that the Dundee City Council has implemented a cost-effective IT architecture with IBM System z and IBM XIV Storage System technologies.
Dundee is Scotland's fourth largest city, home to 145,000 people. Like all U.K. local authorities, the Dundee City Council needs to handle increasing demand for IT and e-government services, while also reducing costs in line with central government targets. When the lease on its server and storage hardware needed to be renewed, the council saw an opportunity to enhance its capabilities and increase value for money.
Dundee worked with IBM to upgrade its mainframe environment with two powerful IBM System z10 servers, and introduced the IBM XIV Storage System to replace a mixed storage environment. The new infrastructure runs a range of Linux applications and Oracle databases - supporting key systems such as social services 24x7.
The biggest benefit of the new infrastructure is the improvement in performance that it delivers, says Tim Simpson, IT support manager at the Dundee City Council. "The combination of the z10 processors and the XIV grid architecture gives us 50% better performance than our previous infrastructure - which means we can run 50% more workload for the same price. As a result, we can deliver more, faster online services and better value for taxpayers' money, without increasing the IT budget." Read the details of the upgrade process in the case study.