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City government discovers the outstanding reliability of Linux on System z
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Hybrid Cloud
Applicable Industries
- Cities & Municipalities
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
The Challenge
Dundee City Council, serving a population of 145,000 citizens in Scotland, was challenged to do more with less, and identified IT as an area in which it could cut costs. The council needed to make cost savings without impacting the quality of service to citizens. The council soon identified its IT infrastructure as an area where changes were urgently needed to avoid service interruptions, and also where significant savings could be made. Convinced that the answer to its IT challenges lay in virtualization, Dundee City Council began formulating a plan to consolidate physical servers to virtual instances hosted by fewer machines.
About The Customer
Dundee City Council is the local government council for the city of Dundee in Scotland, the United Kingdom. The council serves a population of 145,000 citizens, a number which surges by 20,000 students during university term-time. The council oversees a wide range of municipal services for the city. The council's principal goal is to provide high-quality services to citizens as reliably and cost-effectively as possible, and so it is always on the lookout for ways to stretch budgets further without compromising on service quality.
The Solution
The council consolidated its Oracle Database environment supporting critical services from distributed servers to an IBM® zEnterprise® BC12 platform, dramatically improving efficiency. System z mainframes, running Linux, have been the council’s platform of choice ever since, with the most recent iteration an implementation of two IBM zEnterprise BC12-based Enterprise Linux Servers. The platform is dedicated to running the council’s business-critical Oracle Database environment on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, supporting a range of critical services including payroll and all online services running on a different platform. Each zBC12 is equipped with two IBM Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) specialty engines that are used to run approximately 50 virtual Linux servers. By enabling more efficient management, the solution offers the council superior price-performance.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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