The London Borough of Hillingdon is the westernmost of all the London boroughs and is the second largest in terms of area. It includes Heathrow and Northolt airports, Brunel University and the world-renowned Harefield Hospital. Its Best Value policy reflects the Government's agenda to modernise and improve procurement in local government, which is seen as an opportunity for the Council to rethink the way in which services are delivered, with value for money the most important criterion.

At the same time as Government policy is rightly demanding that public sector purse-holders squeeze every last bit of value from budgets, the eGovernment initiative effectively forces local authorities to equip the many Council businesses with server-intensive computing to support public contact. And because servers are now relatively cheap to buy they have proliferated to the point where they have become a central part of a major problem that Hillingdon has had to face up to – and resolve.

And, this Borough is not unique in terms of this and many of the other ICT challenges it faces. However, what sets Hillingdon apart is its approach to addressing them.

Counting the Cost Savings
Careful control of the purse strings is critical within the local government sector and return on investment is top of the agenda in any ICT decisions to be made. Of course, one of the first challenges facing Hillingdon was that of identifying the true cost of its computer systems. After all, savings are only valid when they are visible and accountable.

Masking the real cost of server computing from the organisation was the fact that individual departments were typically charged for only the capital cost of any equipment and none of the ongoing support and maintenance. Yet, according to Gartner, for every dollar spent on server procurement, organisations spend another seven on accommodation and maintenance over the life of the equipment. This had meant that the infrastructure to support computer assets at the Borough was stretched to breaking point and its non-contractual budgets were largely devoted to fire fighting in order to maintain the existing environment.

As is the case with many other public sector organisations, the maintenance spend meant that any improvements would have to be carefully planned to deliver a significant ROI and executed with little or no room for error. Following the Centralisation of the support and operational delivery of ICT at Hillingdon and alongside the search for better value, the Council was now committed to providing greater transparency and openness in its dealings.

Hillingdon was looking for answers and they came in the form of a server virtualisation campaign from Insite. This promised a great deal in terms of potential cost savings while performance was to be maintained. However, this was only part of the story. With cost high on the agenda there was no luxury of a test environment and the virtualisation implementation had to be carried out on the live system. There really was no room for error.

Power consumption was a major overhead at Hillingdon and the virtualisation project aimed to tackle this in a significant way. The physical servers that Hillingdon virtualised in the first phase used 18720 kVA input current, compared with only 3450 for the VMware estate input current. Likewise, the heat output for that same group of physical servers was 18270 Watts, whereas the heat output for the VMware estate is only 3379 Watts. This represents an 82% savings on both input current and heat output for the servers that were virtualised. Because the input current and heat output for the VMware estate will remain constant, these savings will increase proportionally as more and more servers are consolidated onto the VMware server estate, currently running at just 10 per cent capacity. The overall impact is a significantly reduced carbon footprint. Also, the maintenance expenditure for this new infrastructure has also been reduced considerably, as predicted, thus providing further savings for the Hillingdon budget.

In addition to the physical space and power rationalisation, Insite was able to achieve further savings for Hillingdon in terms of a reduced number of licences for applications and by reducing the number of ports – both LAN and fibre channel – employed. Insite also saved on the cost of obtaining the required VMware licences compared with Hillingdon’s regular licensing partner. And, the training Insite delivered came in right on budget and was also regarded as excellent.

The release of computing and office space has given Hillingdon’s ICT specialists the opportunity to undertake their own development and testing without the risks associated with working in a live environment. They are also proceeding with a programme of server accommodation improvements that will yield further space savings.

All in all, the server virtualisation project has reaped major cost saving benefits for Hillingdon through the consolidation of 58 virtual machines onto a three node ESX server estate, lower capital investment, server support, power, cooling and computer suite environments. Insite hopes to add to these as the project develops further over time.

Efficiency gains
Sir Peter Gershon’s independent review of public sector efficiency (“Releasing resources to the front line” July 2004) has resulted in immense pressures being put on local authorities to get more value from the budgets they control.

Lack of transparency in ICT costs was an issue that needed resolving at Hillingdon as a matter of some urgency. This project offered the opportunity to do just that and the transformation of the IT infrastructure enables new efficiencies to be introduced to the organisation. Hillingdon can now establish a new internal charging model designed to reflect each department’s true IT costs. These can now be calculated on a utility basis rather than the old system of simply paying for the up-front costs of the hardware thus giving a much more realistic view of ICT usage across the organisation.

From the user standpoint there is little change to be noticed. Their systems work in exactly the same way and they have not remarked on any issues. This is a remarkable achievement and means that performance has been maintained throughout the virtualisation project, even though it was implemented in a live environment, in real time, with real users providing real services. There was no room for unplanned outages, extended downtime or nasty surprises of any kind.

According to Beth Hague, London Borough of Hillingdon’s ICT Projects Manager, “It is pleasantly surprising that users are not aware they are using virtual servers at the end of the process. They are only aware that ICT have ‘refreshed’ their server during agreed downtime.

“There have been no complaints about performance, no client side issues, no real impact on the user community. It means we have learned that when we next virtualise a server there’s no real point in frightening users with the prospect of change.”

Virtualisation delivers benefits by creating multiple logical servers on one physical machine. This allows organisations, like Hillingdon, to use available server capacity more efficiently by having one server host multiple operating environments. And it aids high availability and disaster recovery functions by eliminating the need to host identical hardware and software at backup sites. In fact, virtualisation technology is increasingly being adopted to achieve efficiency gains, simplify disaster recovery processes, increase availability and provide greater flexibility.

Gaining a competitive edge
Saving costs and gaining efficiencies in the working environment each produce competitive advantage for organisations. The London Borough of Hillingdon has done both and is now in a position to benefit greatly from improved server efficiency, reduced cost of running and maintenance of the equipment and greater transparency in the overall ICT infrastructure.

Green pressures mean that local authority ICT chiefs must be accountable for their carbon footprints. Virtualisation can, and does, have a major impact here through reduced power requirements for systems and cooling.

Also, business continuity and disaster recovery plans are an essential part of business life today and virtualisation assists in making this process far smoother and quicker. With virtualisation, organisations can implement new systems in a matter of hours and minutes rather than day. This provides considerable, potential advantage to those that take this path.

The gains achieved to date have been significant and have led the Hillingdon team to reflect on further benefits that might be possible with more virtualisation at the Borough. In fact, Beth Hague revealed that the relative ease with which the implementation had been accomplished, the collaborative working partnership and the measurable results had so impressed the Council that, although they had not been planning any more virtualisation in the near term, they had now decided to push ahead with another phase with Insite.

“Having consolidated our storage environment over the last few years, we were keen to see just how radical a change we could make to our whole operation by virtualising as many production servers as we could. We now know what is possible and this project has delivered simplification and savings. We plan to extend the virtualisation activity still further. After all, why not have more of a good thing?” concluded Beth Hague.

For further information about Insite, please visit www.insite-europe.co.uk or telephone 01892 686000.