WA local Gov. Assoc. confident information stored safely

Jul 25, 2005: The Western Australia Local Government Association has implemented a new storage architecture to store, manage and protect its highly sensitive economic, social, political and personal data, and it is confident it is now sufficiently protected.

WALGA is the peak lobbying and advocacy organisations for Western Australia's Local Government bodies and provides consulting and policy advice services to Ministers, politicians and bureaucrats.

It represents the interests of 144 Local Governments, some 1,400 elected members, 12,000 employees and more than 1.9 million constituents in the State.

WALGA used NetApp's partner ASI Solutions to carry out the consolidation project onto a new NetApp enterprise storage system and it expects the new system will provide a major boost to WALGA's information management and data security capabilities, as well as promising to significantly reduce the organisation's IT administration overheads.

Moreno Mattaboni, WALGA's IT services coordinator, said that by doing more with less and keeping overheads low is a main priority for WALGA as the organisation secures funding from membership subscriptions, services and business grants.

"We were impressed with the demonstrated flexibility, scalability, ease of administration and anticipated total cost of ownership of the NetApp system.

"The NetApp system has proven to be highly reliable for us, reducing our backup windows to near zero time. Importantly the cutover to the new system was a breeze with the help of ASI Solutions."

The NetApp systems provides IP SAN storage for WALGA's Microsoft Exchange 2003 and SQL applications using the iSCSI protocol.

In addition, it intends to offer comprehensive data protection, securing all data types with NetApp Snapshot capabilities for automated, near instantaneous, application-level backups and rapid restores.

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