Isle of Man infrastructure heads for the cloud
By Chris Taylor
26/09/2011
The Isle of Man's entire governmental IT infrastructure has moved to the cloud as part of a money-saving operation, Computing.co.uk reports.
Savings of 15 per cent have already been made from the move, as thousands of public applications go online to be accessed remotely. These include services such as email, customer relationship management (CRM) systems and financial accounting.
Over the course of five months the masses of data that the government held was transferred to EMC solid state disk drives and protected by VPLEX virtual storage platforms, across several shared-data centres. In the cast of an failure at one site, remote systems management can automatically resume actions at the other site.
VPLEX storage was chosen as a solution to make sure that new IT system was adaptable to change; as well as remaining fast, reliable and cheap.
Peter Clarke, the chief technology officer for the Isle of Man government, explained on Guardian.co.uk: "By virtualising our entire server platform and all service applications, the Isle of Man Government has significantly increased service levels as well as data flexibility and availability.
"In the case of the health service, this means individual patient records are now aggregated and appropriate information made instantly available to doctors, EMT specialists, ambulance technicians, surgeons, nurses and other authorised users."
The site adds that data availability and system performance with the new system has increased by a factor of eight; meanwhile storage utilisation has increased by 40 per cent but this required no increase in hardware.
