NettApp teams with Microsoft on bushfire info portal

Peter Dinham
Thursday, 05 November 2009 09:39

IT Industry - Deals

NetApp and Microsoft have teamed up to implement a virtualised data storage solution to enable a single, multi-agency portal for bushfire information for the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE).

The consolidated data storage solution allows Victoria’s Integrated Emergency Control Centre and Incident Control Centres across the state to directly post mission-critical information to the portal in real time, enhancing situational and community awareness and improving the safety of public and emergency services workers.

The DSE Fire Information Systems Group, in conjunction with NetApp and Microsoft, upgraded the Department’s “Fireweb” application, which was previously running on legacy fibre channel SAN and many physical servers, but is now running on an environment based on the virtualised NetApp Data OnTAP storage operating system and Microsoft Hyper-V software.

The DSE is responsible for managing 7.6 million hectares of public land across Victoria, which represents approximately one-third of the state, and is chartered with reducing the risk of fire, containing outbreaks and managing environmental effects caused by fire.  

DSE’s manager, fire information systems group, Anthony Griffiths, said “to ensure that we can effectively manage the risk of fire, we required our previous, complex system architecture to be simplified and become more highly available.  The new system had to support key information services such as real-time telemetry from critical assets like aircraft, and make that information available quickly and efficiently across our multiple application services.

“Implementing the NetApp solution allows us to recover from major system failures in minutes. Past failures have taken at least eight hours to recover our data, and often longer, but now we can restore instantly.  We can also support multi tenancy and share critical data to multiple agencies and the public in a secure manner without complex point solutions.”

According to Griffiths, using NetApp’s SnapMirror and Snapshot features to rapidly mirror data between sites using very low WAN bandwidth, coupled with primary storage de-duplication, “provides us with a very low TCO solution that delivers the availability and performance we need while ensuring our ICT is more environmentally sustainable.  The storage overhaul also provided a holistic view of the environment and single point of management.”