HP helps New Zealand Government Council

Northland Regional Council (NRC), a New Zealand government agency, has selected HP Converged Infrastructure to improve employee productivity by increasing the performance, scalability and efficiency of its virtualized IT environment.

NRC provides environmental and emergency management, public transport planning and funding, and coastal navigation and safety services for 159,000 residents in northern New Zealand. The agency’s existing storage infrastructure was unable to support rapid data growth or upgrades to web applications used by constituents. Plus, reduced performance of NRC’s business-critical applications due to the aging infrastructure was hindering productivity of the organization’s 176 employees.

NRC selected HP Converged Infrastructure solutions to improve storage capacity and performance while simplifying data center management. By upgrading to HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage and HP ProLiant DL380p Generation 8 (Gen8) servers, NRC has improved employee productivity and constituent service through a 40-percent increase in business-critical application performance, reducing the time required for database tasks by 50 percent and speeding virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) login time by 63 percent.

With the enhanced system scalability, NRC was able to upgrade land development consent and monitoring applications, which reduced website latency, improving usability for visitors. Additionally, the agency is using the HP 3PAR Management Console to simplify administration by automatically provisioning virtual volumes with a few mouse clicks.

To reduce the risk of downtime in the event of a disaster, NRC also deployed an HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage system at its disaster recovery site. The new large-capacity storage system, which was installed and configured in a matter of hours, enables NRC to restore data in less than 30 minutes—twice as fast as with its previous storage system, eliminating workflow disruptions. The ability to manage HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage systems at NRC’s primary and disaster recovery data centers via a single management console also reduces administrative time.

“Our existing IT infrastructure just couldn’t support business-critical applications and kept us from efficiently delivering services to constituents,” said Daniel Blake, senior systems engineer, Northland Regional Council. “Since upgrading to HP Converged Infrastructure, our virtual environment runs so much faster, we’ve been able to increase staff productivity by spending less time on data center administration and more time enhancing public services.”

NRC also implemented HP 3PAR Thin Provisioning Software to improve storage efficiency and asset utilization. As a result, the agency saved approximately 50 percent in storage capacity,(1) which will minimize future hardware investments as it scales its data storage infrastructure. This hardware reduction is expected to curtail costs related to data center power and cooling.

System performance and efficiency also is enhanced with HP Adaptive Optimization Software, which automates the previously manual task of administering data across three storage tiers. By distributing data to the right storage tier at the right time, the software reduces data center administration while maximizing system performance and utilization capacity, which further reduces the need for future storage investments.
New HP ProLiant DL380p Gen 8 servers in NRC’s production environment also helped boost application performance by 40 percent, while allowing the agency to relocate existing HP ProLiant DL585 servers to its disaster recovery site, thereby enhancing business continuity.

“Rapid data growth created by greater demand for citizen services can hamper a government agency’s ability to deliver services,” said Mike Prieto, vice president and general manager, Storage—Asia Pacific and Japan, HP. “With the efficiency, scalability and performance of HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage, Northland Regional Council delivers improved service capabilities and productivity by ensuring uninterrupted access to data and applications for constituents and employees.”