Sydney, Australia - 4 November 2009
- NetApp has teamed with Microsoft to help the Victorian
Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) implement a
virtualized data storage solution which enables a single,
multi-agency portal for bushfire information.
Responsible for managing 7.6 million hectares
of public land across the state (which represents approximately
one-third of Victoria), the Department of Sustainability and
Environment is chartered with reducing the risk of fire, containing
outbreaks and managing environmental effects caused by fire.
The consolidated data storage solution allows
the State Integrated Emergency Control Centre and Incident Control
Centres across the state to directly post mission-critical
information to the portal in real time, enhancing situational and
community awareness and improving the safety of public and
emergency services workers.
The DSE Fire Information Systems Group, in
conjunction with NetApp and Microsoft, upgraded the Department's
"Fireweb" application. Fireweb was previously running on legacy
fibre channel SAN and many physical servers. It is now running on
an environment based on the virtualised NetApp Data OnTAP storage
operating system and Microsoft Hyper-V software.
Anthony Griffiths, Manager, Fire Information
Systems Group, Victorian Department of Environment and
Sustainability, said, "To ensure that we can effectively manage the
risk of fire, we required our previous, complex system architecture
to be simplified and become more highly available. The new system
had to support key information services such as real-time telemetry
from critical assets like aircraft, and make that information
available quickly and efficiently across our multiple application
services.
"Implementing the NetApp solution allows us
to recover from major system failures in minutes. Past failures
have taken at least eight hours to recover our data, and often
longer, but now we can restore instantly. We can also support multi
tenancy and share critical data to multiple agencies and the public
in a secure manner without complex point solutions.
"Using NetApp's SnapMirror and Snapshot
features to rapidly mirror data between sites using very low WAN
bandwidth, coupled with primary storage de-duplication, provides us
with a very low TCO solution that delivers the availability and
performance we need while ensuring our ICT is more environmentally
sustainable. The storage overhaul also provided a holistic view of
the environment and single point of management," Griffiths
said.
The Fire Information Systems Group deployed
NetApp FAS3140 and FAS2050 systems, with Microsoft Hyper-V and
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 to support Fireweb. Efficiency gains have
been made by implementing NetApp Deduplication, Thin Provisioning
and FlexClone®, while application availability is improved
through the use of NetApp Snapshot®, SnapManager for SQL
Server®, SnapMirror® and SnapVault®. Multi-tenancy
utilises NetApp Multistore® to securely separate information
storage resources.
Multiple storage protocols are used,
including iSCSI, Fibre Channel and CIFS, which allow the Victorian
Department of Sustainability and Environment to achieve high
performance for critical systems and keep infrastructure costs
contained.
The NetApp implementation has allowed the
Fire Information Systems Group to implement cost-effective
replication to support disaster recovery with SnapMirror, and if
required, to also recover data rapidly from frequent disk-based
backups using NetApp Snapshot and SnapVault, eliminating reliance
on tape.
About NetApp
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Media Contact:
Laura Skelley
Max Australia
+61 2 9954 3492
laura.skelley@maxaustralia.com.au
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