Working with Premier Business Partner REAL Solutions, Flintshire County Council has consolidated 18 physical servers to logical partitions on two System i 570s, and added Linux partitions to the same systems to handle the file serving workload, according to a report from IBM.

Now, System i technology supports three different operating systems in a single physical footprint, with the ability to dynamically reallocate system resources in response to changing patterns of demand. Introducing Linux has also enabled Flintshire to decommission 30 physical servers.

Long the poster boy of System i-driven local government in the UK, Flintshire provides municipal services to 148,000 citizens, with a combined annual revenue/capital budget of £287m. In addition to maintaining local schools and roads, the council’s 7,500 employees are responsible for collecting taxes, running social services, and maintaining the county’s extensive leisure facilities. As a unitary authority, the council offers 750 distinct public services, and runs 350 business-critical systems to support them.

With a large and growing number of physical servers to support, Flintshire’s relatively small IT team was spending as much time on routine administration as on developing and delivering new services. New rapid development projects were already pushing the capabilities of its infrastructure to the limit, central government initiatives resulted in the replacement of older software, and the creation of new online services for citizens was set to increase the pressure.

“Our goal was to reduce complexity in the infrastructure and eliminate systems management issues,” says John Thomas, Flintshire’s operational services manager.

Aiming to gain more flexibility in service provision and reduce the number of physical servers it needed to manage, Flintshire consolidated 18 older iSeries and pSeries servers to two System i platforms running both i5/OS and AIX 5L V5.3. Since this initial migration, the council has upgraded its two System i570s and increased from 18 partitions to nearly 30. Each i570 has 16 POWER5+ processors, four of which are held in reserve and can be activated when required using On/Off Capacity on Demand.

“We migrated our entire AIX workload to logical partitions on the i570s, and we’ve since added a number of new AIX partitions, each of which has saved us from having to buy another new physical server,” says Thomas. “Beyond the direct cost savings in terms of hardware acquisition and maintenance, we’re also keeping the physical infrastructure more simple and manageable.”

The i570s now handle 80% of the total business workload at Flintshire, including IBM Domino for 2,500 users, financial applications, human resources, payroll and numerous public administration systems. While Flintshire has been an iSeries user since 1996, the website has been running on iSeries since 2002. Key areas are business and A-to-Z of services providing quick and easy access into the many services offered.

“The business value of the System i solution is its ability to simplify the infrastructure by acting as a platform for consolidation,” says Thomas. “Most organisations need to run multiple operating systems, typically resulting in a sprawling, costly infrastructure that’s difficult to maintain and unresponsive to new demands. By consolidating to System i, we’ve created a compact and robust infrastructure in which we can concentrate all our investment in redundancy and HA, leaving staff with more time to focus on service delivery.”

The success of the virtualisation concept on System i is now being extended to the Intel environment, where Flintshire is introducing VMware virtualisation software running on System x3950 servers (there are four x3950s running 10 virtual Windows servers each, and business applications are being migrated).

When Flintshire made a strategic decision to migrate away from Novell NetWare as its file serving platform for Microsoft Windows desktop users, the implications of moving directly to Windows on the server side were considered. It seemed the 30 existing physical servers would need to be replaced by 50 new servers, an unacceptable increase in infrastructure size and complexity.

“Instead, we successfully migrated our file servers to Samba running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server in a partition on the i570,” says Thomas. “We’ve a single server for 2,500 users, offering better availability, performance and scalability than the previous solution, at much lower cost than the stand-alone alternative.”

The Linux partition on the first i570 is mirrored to the second for HA, and uses less than one CPU, making it cost-effective. Availability has also improved, since there’s no longer any need to shut down the file server for the purpose of backing up data (which now takes place in the background).

“Linux on i570 provides very high availability, and there’s no systems management overhead,” says Thomas. “If we add more users or need more storage capacity, we just dynamically adjust the resources available to the Linux partitions without even taking the system down.”

If Flintshire had chosen to deploy its file servers on stand-alone servers, the management overhead would have been much higher, and any increase in the capacity of the servers would have required physical intervention and a lengthy period of downtime. Equally, the council would have needed to invest in spare capacity on each one of the 50 physical servers, to account for spikes in demand and general growth in data volumes over the expected life of the servers.

With Linux, AIX and i5/OS running on System i, Flintshire has a robust yet flexible infrastructure offering very high availability. “We have never experienced any unscheduled downtime on the i570s,” says Thomas, “There’s no such phrase in our organisation as ‘the e-mail’s down’. The robustness of System i -- and System x -- is a cornerstone of our approach to IT service provision. With System i, we’ve invested in systems designed not to go down, so we can focus staff resources on business needs, rather than wasting time/skills on routine maintenance and troubleshooting common with other, less reliable platforms.”

The two i570s are housed in separate data centres linked by dual redundant dedicated fibre-optic connections. All business-critical services are mirrored between the two sites, enabling Flintshire to fail over to the second site in the event of a disaster.

“Over the past two/three years, the workload on our System i has increased enormously. It hosts our website and most of the back-end databases, which have grown from 80,000 to 500,000 hits/month. To manage that growth, we have dynamically re-allocated the system resources, enabling us to expand with minimal disruption and no need to ‘rip-and-replace’ hardware. This makes the i570 the ideal platform for a fast-growing organisation like ours.”

Frank Booty, industry reporter.