Vale Royal Borough Council protects critical services with Stratus fault-tolerant servers

ASHFORD, UK - 20th September 2007 – Stratus Technologies today announced that Vale Royal Borough Council is using fault-tolerant ftServers to protect its critical document imaging systems and provide continuous availability of these files to around 400 employees.

In order for staff to remain productive, the Council’s Planning, Council Tax and Benefits departments require access to documents around the clock. Mike Prince, ICT technical supervisor at Vale Royal Borough Council, said “Working with our partner Hollinbay, we chose to run our document imaging system on fault-tolerant servers from Stratus: this gave us the required level of protection against failure, but it was also far easier for us to manage. The timescale for delivering the service was also a factor: by using Stratus, we were able to deliver the updated application to our user community on-time and on-budget.”

Vale Royal Borough Council decided to update its corporate document imaging systems to improve performance and increase the overall number of employees that would have access to the application. Because staff would be accessing files through this system continuously throughout the day, any outage or period of downtime would lead to staff being unproductive: the platform that would support this application would need to be extremely robust and reliable, while also being easy to manage and maintain.

“Vale Royal Borough Council has around 400 users that are reliant on the Camino W2 document imaging system, and any incident of downtime would have a significant impact on the performance of the Council Tax, Benefits and Planning departments,” added Mike. “We initially looked at clustering to provide the level of availability that we required, but this would be overly complicated and difficult for us to maintain. The costs involved in managing a cluster were too much for us to consider. Taking the fault-tolerant approach will also deliver a return on our investment during the life of the project through reduced license costs, simplified management and not having to train staff in supporting complex clustering systems.” The Stratus servers were initially purchased in November 2006, and the systems went live in March 2007 following a short training period.

“Applications of all kinds can be critical to how an organisation works,” commented Andy Bailey, availability consultant, Stratus Technologies. “The impact that any incident of downtime can have on the organisation if that application is not available can be considerable. In the public sector, access to citizen data has to be as reliable as possible to meet the level of service that is expected. By using fault-tolerant servers, Vale Royal Borough Council has achieved much higher levels of availability compared to the cluster option, and at a lower overall cost.”

Hollinbay IT Services was responsible for delivering the overall High Availabiltiy infrastructure and support to the Vale Royal Borough Council. “Working with Vale Royal Borough Council, we knew that that the availability of the application would be an important part of the system design,” said Robert Holder, managing director of Hollinbay. “Using Stratus servers allows Vale Royal Borough Council to meet this requirement more efficiently than a cluster-based approach, as well as being faster to implement. The timescale for delivering this project was an aggressive one, so the fact that Stratus’ technology is so simple to install was another key part of the decision.”