Greater Manchester Police needed to increase its immediate storage capacity as well as future proof its systems to allow predicted storage growth. The organisation wanted to further consolidate its storage without adding additional layers of complexity to the IT department's work. But at the same time, GMP wanted to improve its data resilience and business continuity arrangements.
The force had already made a strategic decision to use NetApp as its supplier for storage systems. So the organisation wanted to build on that, but ideally also allow systems administrators to continue to use familiar tools to manage storage capacity across both the force HQ, and the business continuity site.
Success Story
NetApp Helps Greater
Manchester Police
Bring Law and Order
to Storage
CUSTOMER PROFILE "The issue for us was capacity management Greater Manchester Police (GMP) is one of and storage growth," says Andrew Gorton, the 43 police forces in England and Wales. systems planning team leader in IT at Greater Covering an area of 500 square miles in Manchester Police. "The demand for storage, northwest England, it serves a population of especially from applications such as ANPR two and a half million and employs 12,586 and CCTV, is growing but general storage is people across 15 main sites. Its duties cover growing too."KEY HIGHLIGHTS all the main areas of law enforcement. Greater Manchester Police needed to THE CHALLENGE increase its immediate storage capacity as Industry well as future proof its systems to allow Law Enforcement Manage storage growth and predicted storage growth. The organisation improve data resilienceThe challenge wanted to further consolidate its storage Law enforcement is by no means immune to Meeting growing storage needs and without adding additional layers of complex-the trend toward more electronic storage of improving data resilience, without ity to the IT department's work. But at the critical data. The force expects its data adding complexity to the IT environment same time, GMP wanted to improve its data storage requirements to grow at between 10 resilience and business continuity arrange-The solution and 20 terabytes a year over the next few ments.NetApp FAS3050 clusters were years, driven by applications such as ANPR augmented by FAS6040 systems to (automatic number plate recognition) and The force had already made a strategic provide additional capacity, to allow a CCTV, as well as scene-of-the-crime decision to use NetApp as its supplier for three-tier storage infrastructure, and to information and other audio and video storage systems. So the organisation wanted allow two identical systems to run across records. to build on that, but ideally also allow the force's primary and recovery sites. systems administrators to continue to use In addition, the force has a tapeless backup An R200 provides near-line storage. familiar tools to manage storage capacity environment and has 30- and 90-day NetApp Professional Services helped to across both the force HQ, and the business retention windows for critical information. design the system architecture, identify continuity site.Users' data from the force's 7,400 desktop and remove performance bottlenecks, and 1,500 laptop PC systems are also held However, GMP also wanted to remove some and manage data migration. and managed on the central storage speci? c bottlenecks in application perform-Bene? ts systems, rather than on local drives. At the ance and improve both uptime and storage . Storage capacity growth within same time GMP is seeing growth in the utilisation. As a further challenge, the existing infrastructure structured data produced by its central organisation had both recovery time business systems. objectives and recovery point objectives that . G reater storage utilisation were, in effect, zero.. I mproved application performance. B usiness continuity and resilience targets met or exceeded"The infrastructure is now
more resilient and more
available. We are moving to
even tighter service-level
agreements, and this will
help us to do that."Andrew Gorton systems planning team leader, Greater Manchester Police
THE SOLUTION The NetApp team was also able to relieve Application performance has increased, as Implement a three-tier storage pressure on existing systems by identifying has storage utilisation. Capacity is used more infrastructure based on NetApp solutions where data could be moved to the lower-cost ef? ciently, and the uptime for the NetApp Greater Manchester Police opted to add to SATA systems, and by identifying and environment is at least 99%. The organisa-its existing NetApp environment by buying removing some speci? c application tion has also been able to meet its business additional clusters. Bringing new capacity on bottlenecks. continuity requirements, especially the stream allowed the organisation to make use speci? c retention periods for each class of By separating the data paths for unstructured of both high-performance Fibre Channel data.(? le) and structured (bloc... [download for more]
