Southland Council rolls out Hitachi SAN

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Move driven by decision to adopt electronic workflow

By Randal Jackson | Wellington | Friday, 24 October, 2008

Southland District Council has opted for SAN storage to cope with fast-rising volumes of rich media and virtualisation requirements.

The council has replaced a collection of HP Proliant DL storage servers with Hitachi’s AMS200 mid-range SAN to manage digital imaging projects and expand a recent deployment of VMware virtualisation to additional servers.

CIO Damon Campbell says the move was driven by a decision to adopt electronic workflow, which necessitates the digital capture of paper documents and records so that they can be managed in the newly upgraded TRIM electronic document and records management system.

There were additional projects, including digital aerial photography of Southland district’s 31,000 square kilometres, and integrating digital video of its roading network with GIS systems.

The tender was won by storage integrator Revera and vendor HDS.

The new SAN went live late last month and is supported and monitored by Revera’s active monitoring service, which flags potential disk problems and automates the shipment of new disks in the event of failure.

Scalable to 96 terabytes, the Hitachi SAN will underpin a largely Microsoft operating environment.

“These projects will tip the council fully into the digital realm,” says Campbell. “We’ve got to have a consolidated storage platform to simplify management and give council staff the necessary service to access information easily and quickly.”