Bayside City Council

Four minutes of downtime to replace everything

Bayside City Council runs services for around 97,000 residents across 36 square kilometres of Melbourne’s south. In the middle of the largest capital works program the council had committed to, its IT infrastructure was six years old and had become the thing most likely to stop that program working.

The environment had drifted into a state most council IT managers will recognise. Multiple disparate systems that had been added rather than designed. External vendors called in regularly just to keep things running. Hardware past end of support. And, most seriously, a disaster recovery position that could not meet the council’s own compliance obligations.

Bayside went to public tender. A lot of vendors responded.

The presentation that Onel submitted was a stand out. They clearly had the products to meet our requirements, but they also demonstrated that they had the support capability and technical knowledge to give us confidence that they could execute a complete overhaul of our environment.

Kathryn Tozer, Manager, Information Services, Bayside City Council

The decision that mattered was not the hardware

The interesting question at Bayside was not which storage vendor to buy. It was whether a council should be running its own infrastructure at all.

This was the height of cloud-first policy, and the easy recommendation would have been to move everything and take the margin on the migration. We did the analysis with Bayside instead, and the answer for their workloads was a private cloud on their own premises, with a second site for disaster recovery.

Kathryn describes the reasoning better than we would:

I was undecided about fully cloud or on premise, but after exhaustive research and risk analysis I’m pleased that we implemented private cloud infrastructure on-premise. You have a guarantee that it’s your infrastructure, up time, greater security, and in an ever changing software environment, an easier option for integrations. If something goes wrong, you’re not logging a ticket and hoping for a good response time from a cloud vendor.

Kathryn Tozer, Bayside City Council

That is the conversation we would rather have than a migration pitch. Sometimes the answer is cloud. At Bayside it was not, and saying so is why the platform is still doing its job.

What we built

A converged on-premises data centre, fully virtualised, replicated to a second site:

• HPE Nimble all-flash storage for production, giving low-latency performance to virtualised applications with snapshot and replication built in
• HPE Nimble adaptive flash at the DR site, close to all-flash performance without paying all-flash prices for a standby platform
• VMware vSphere across a one hundred per cent virtualised workload
• Veeam application-aware backups to an HPE StoreOnce target, twelve months of disk-based retention with object-level recovery
• A new core network with stretched VLANs between the production and DR sites
• VMware SRM to automate failover, fallback and DR testing
• Storage-level, application-aware replication that can run from either site
• Archives older than twelve months moved to public cloud, where the economics actually favour it

The cutover took four to five minutes

Replacing six years of infrastructure usually means a weekend, a rollback plan and a nervous Monday. Bayside’s cutover required four to five minutes of downtime.

That number is the one worth paying attention to, because it is a measure of how well the design and the rehearsal were done rather than how good the hardware is.

What changed afterwards

The council’s internal auditors reviewed the new disaster recovery setup and told Bayside they were a sector leader on it. For a local government IT team, that is a rarer outcome than a fast storage array.

The more useful change was quieter. The platform stopped needing attention.

Bayside’s IT team had been spending its time keeping systems alive. With the environment stable and monitored, that time went back into the council’s transformation program. They have since moved into data warehousing and analytics, using the performance of the underlying platform to run data-intensive workloads that would not have been possible before, so that the council can engage with residents proactively rather than reactively.

We now have a robust, secure and scalable platform with full visibility of our environment via cloud proactive monitoring, and simplicity of infrastructure, all with a single support number.

Kathryn Tozer, Bayside City Council

Why they stayed

Bayside has been a client since 2018.

They are not a drop and run organisation.

They are not a drop and run organisation. They are beyond a sale, it’s a solution with support for the life of the contract. We can call them at any time and they’ll respond promptly. We’ve had a couple of outages and I have been very impressed with the response and resolution times.

Kathryn Tozer, Bayside City Council