Brookline Virtualizes Storage For Government Information

The challenges facing government IT professionals are, in many respects, the same challenges faced by all IT pros, with the additional stresses of citizens and various constituencies (not to mention open-access laws and regulations) thrown into the mix. When a community decides that it's time to upgrade its computing infrastructure, it can become a long-term project with many different goals and targets to be met along the way. That's the experience of the city of Brookline, Massachusetts, a community of about 60,000 just outside Boston that began a path toward virtual servers and storage about three years ago.

Kevin Stokes is CIO for the town and public schools of Brookline. He says that the process of looking at the overall architecture in the city's strategic planning led directly to consideration of server virtualization as part of the strategy for how the IT group would get there.

Stokes says that he didn't begin the process with an understanding of storage as a strategic piece of the infrastructure. "I'll admit that I started out thinking of storage as a commodity, and I didn't appreciate it as a strategic part of the vision. We found, through some unfortunate situations where we lost some key data, that not all storage is created equal," he says.

Brookline had been using EMC storage branded by Dell since 2002, but the IT group didn't see the products as a long-term direction for the city.  Ultimately, the Brookline IT folks decided to stay with EMC, but chose the Clariion CX4 family of mid-range storage products for their needs. Stokes says that the CX4 units they considered were actually on the small size for the anticipated storage needs of the city, but that the features and capabilities of the CX4 met the priorities of the new architecture.

After considering many different options and carefully designing a new architecture, the project could get underway. Stokes says, "We really started virtualization in January of 08. In the building blocks we had there were a lot of storage needs, and the virtualization made it obvious that we needed a robust and resilient storage solution. We've consolidated north of fifty servers down to thirteen blades and about fifty virtual servers. From where I sit storage sits at the center of virtualization." He says that he considers Brookline fortunate in that the city has the resources to act on the understanding of storage's importance to the newly-virtual environment -- it all came down to the budget.Stokes understands that Brookline sits in the middle of a highly-fashionable flavor of computing right now. "Virtualization is booming everywhere you go, and storage is a key part of that," he says.

Brookline has been able to execute the biggest part of their revised IT strategy, Stokes says, largely through the efforts of professional services partnerships. "We worked closely with a local reseller to make sure the architecture was right. You want to think it through before you start making purchases. We worked with Focus Technologies, a local group that resells EMC to help us put a stake in the ground and get going," he explains. Stokes points out that there were others consultants and integrators involved in the project, but considers Focus Technologies the primary partner, though he also credits EMC Global Services for their role in the implementation, providing initial analysis of the town's environment and assisting with design and implementation of the new Clariion infrastructure.

To manage the volume of information and complexity of its applications, the town consolidated its disparate storage residing on an EMC Clariion CX3 and 45 HP servers onto an EMC Clariion CX4 networked storage system for financial management, email, Microsoft SQL Server, geographic information systems (GIS), energy management, Microsoft Office and school administration.  This system is managed, monitored and configured using EMC Navisphere software.

When asked about where Brookline is in the overall implementation of the full IT strategy, Stokes pauses. "Certainly, I don't know if I could pinpoint precisely where we are, but disk to disk backup and replication are next on my plate. This is a key part of the storage infrastructure, being able to move things around and protect data in case of a disaster," he says. Stokes says that disaster recovery and data assurance were the first priorities in the new storage infrastructure. Now that he feels confident in those capabilities, Stokes says that he plans to move forward to performance issues with both virtualized storage and virtualized servers.

Why not begin with performance as the first issue tackled? Stokes says, "Disaster recovery really is key. We're an e-commerce environment but we're not an e-commerce retailer. I needed disk but I didn't need maximum IO in terms of performance. We have a lot of data we have to make available and keep secure, so my priority is availability and security rather than raw performance." He explains that the Brookline environment doesn't include a thousand people hitting on a database at one time that makes storage performance the key issue.When asked about the reasons Brookline focused attention on disaster recovery capabilities rather than simply signing a contract with a well-known business-continuity service provider, Stokes says, "Realistically my thinking is that we're looking in-house for all the disaster recovery requirements. I can get more value out of having disk available to me here rather than having a farm available to me somewhere in case I have a big problem. Like everybody, I'm focused on tactical issues, shortening my backup window and being able to provision servers more quickly. Will H1N1 mean more people working from remote locations or from home? We have to be able to provision servers to allow us to be very flexible very quickly."

The virtual servers created through VMWare and virtual storage components created on the EMC hardware and managed with the Navisphere software allow the IT group to take advantage of rapid virtual provisioning to respond to short term spikes in demand for data and services. Stokes says, "I think we're very much in the same place as a corporate CIO. Corporate networks and public-sector networks are the same. It's all about governance, management and resiliency. It's an evolution."

Ultimately, Stokes says, a successful move to virtualization is based on the same factors that govern success in any IT transition. "The goals of three years ago versus two years ago versus next year shift, and you want to make sure that all the investments you make in your infrastructure are reusable. Our decisions in storage have an impact on our virtualization, and our decisions in virtualization have an impact on disaster recovery."

For the town of Brookline, keeping data safe and available has been entrusted to a virtual environment. Stokes doesn't know precisely what either the environment or the infrastructure will look like years from now, but he seems confident that the process followed in the last three years has laid a foundation that will allow his organization to grow and be flexible to meet any needs the citizens of Brookline might have when it comes to their city's data.