Case Study —
County of Elgin

With a far flung computing system running numerous municipally controlled services and operations, the County of Elgin was looking for a way to make everything run more efficiently while reducing costs, all while improving systems availability required to meet the mission critical needs of their IT
services.

The answer was a bit of a surprise—use fewer servers. The suggestion came from the experts at Protek Integrated Business Systems, the county's long-standing IT provider. Over the last year, Elgin County has reduced its server count from 15 to fewer than half of that. By the end of the year, there will be only five or six, all told.

"Protek helped us simplify our whole system, and also improve reliability and reduce costs," says Al Reitsma, the county’s manager of IT. "We look after the information technology needs at 10 public libraries, three long-term care facilities and, of course, the county administration building. It's a large geographical area, and we have about 160 computers."

More than half of the county's 500 employees are licensed users of the computer system, a number that will grow in the coming years as the new system is rolled out in its entirety.

"In the past we had 15 servers, and some of them might only have been 2% utilized. Now we can make much greater use of each server in a more flexible way," Reitsma says. "I looked at several virtual server technologies and asked Al MacKinnon at Protek about it. He recommended VMware as a superior solution, and I have to agree."

The revamped system has replaced traditional servers with virtual servers and a Storage Area Network (SAN) to allocate server space in the most efficient possible way while addressing the needs for improved availability and their disaster recovery plan.

"There are no hard drives on the new servers," Reitsma notes. "It's amazing. They boot from a memory stick, which takes away a point of failure and should give us more years of service from our servers. That’s important, because as a municipality, we try to make equipment last for as long as possible."

In concert with the new SAN, Protek also installed the Enterprise VMware solution designed to maximize the way each CPU is used, creating several virtual servers on one physical device, making each server much more efficient. This solution is equipped with automatic system recovery to eliminate downtime relating to hardware failures and automatic system load balancing capabilities to ensure systems are running at their peak performance.

"By putting in the virtual servers and helping the county use them more efficiently, we have reduced costs in a number of areas and dramatically reduced the risk of downtime," says MacKinnon, one of four Protek partners. "They will use 50% less power running so many fewer servers, and that will also reduce their cooling costs."

As he looks ahead to the challenges of upgrading to the next Windows platform, Reitsma says the process will be far less daunting than previous upgrades have been. "With our new system and software, we can take a snapshot of the servers before we upgrade. If something doesn't work, it's simple to just go back—kind of like an undo button. We couldn't do that before."

Article and photography originally appeared in London Business Magazine