Modernizing IT Infrastructure for Growth

Modernizing for growth

In the City of Rockingham, Australia, a small IT team must add services and support new initiatives at a rapid pace. "We're a growth council with a rising population and a large community infrastructure plan," says Michael Yakas, manager of customer and corporate support for the City of Rockingham. "The city is spending about AU$45 million on a new recreation and sports complex. We will be supporting new [closed-circuit TV] infrastructure while also ensuring all corporate systems are accessible and reliable."

All of the city's critical workloads—from enterprise resource planning to records management to recreation management—were running on traditional IT infrastructure that had reached end of life. "Our existing server and storage infrastructure needed to be modernized," Yakas continues. "To meet the City's requirements, we've established an IT strategy based on three pillars: standardize, simplify, and improve. We wanted to deploy infrastructure that would not only simplify operations and support growth but also allow us to improve disaster recovery and business continuity."

Standardizing on hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI)

The city released a tender detailing the requirements for its infrastructure refresh. "We looked at solutions from a number of vendors, but the Cisco HyperFlex solution presented to us by Cirrus Networks really caught our attention," says Yakas. "Our team are all generalists. We don't have a storage or server specialist. Cisco HyperFlex enables us to standardize on a hyperconverged infrastructure solution that makes it much easier for our small team to manage everything."

"With Cisco HyperFlex, we have a lot more computing power, so provisioning, migration, and backup tasks are a lot faster now," continues Yakas. "We're confident this is a solution that can scale to meet the city's growing needs."

For the City of Rockingham, the ability to manage everything from a single interface makes a big difference. "Cisco Intersight provides a single management console to monitor and manage our hyperconverged environment," says Yakas. "Previously, the team used virtual infrastructure management plus additional consoles for managing servers and storage. Intersight presents everything from a single pane of glass. It's simple to use, so we can spin up new servers in no time and migrate servers for maintenance tasks without taking downtime."

Stretching the limits

The City's tender included requirements for disaster recovery and business continuity that the Cisco HyperFlex architecture also addressed. A Cisco HyperFlex stretched cluster provides active-active mode disaster avoidance for mission-critical workloads with high uptime and no data loss.

"Our previous infrastructure really wasn't able to support our business continuity plan," says Yakas. "Now, with Cisco HyperFlex stretched across two sites, if an outage affects one site, the other location can seamlessly support all of our operations."

"Backups are another important element of our business continuity plan," Yakas continues. "We had an issue with backups when I first took over the team, and we put a temporary solution in place. The transition to Cisco HyperFlex gave us the opportunity to revisit backups. Now we are relying on Veeam for backups, with data copies at both sites in case they are needed for recovery."

If anything affects the city's online services, residents notice right away. "Our data centers are connected to more than 20 remote locations around the city. If something goes down, it could impact every outstation," says Yakas. "For instance, if the recreation management system is down, the gates at recreation centers may not open."

This means that avoiding downtime—from disasters and planned outages—is important. "The ability to perform online infrastructure upgrades with Cisco HyperFlex makes it easier for us to meet our 99.5 percent uptime [service-level agreement], and we can now do upgrades during business hours if we need to," explains Yakas. "We also refreshed some of our core networking with Cisco Catalyst switches that can be upgraded without disruption as well."

Partners for peace of mind

For small IT teams, it can be important to pick the right partners to help ensure that strong support networks are in place when you need them. "The IT infrastructure layer is critical to city operations, and we like to think we're doing our bit to support the city's strategy," says Yakas. "We've used Cisco networking for a long time and now we've standardized on Cisco HyperFlex. Cisco is a key partner for us and a trusted name."

Peace of mind is important, and the city's IT team is now able to do much more to build confidence in its internal processes. "We're now able to do annual failover testing, which is something we've never done before," explains Yakas. "I've also got the team working on monthly backup tests to make sure we are able to restore data should we need to." 

The City of Rockingham is also partnered with Cirrus Networks, a well-known Australian provider of IT solutions and managed services. "Cirrus presented the stretched Cisco HyperFlex architecture to us, and the success of our implementation is all down to Cirrus and their team," says Yakas. "A network refresh is the next big project and we'll be looking to continue to standardize, simplify, and improve our operations."