Growing use of spatial technology and satellite imagery for line of business applications has led the NSW Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water (DECCW) to overhaul its storage platform with NetApp.

The DECCW has consolidated its existing, multi-vendor storage environment under the NetApp V-Series heterogeneous storage solution.

NetApp was engaged to redesign its storage environment due to the increasing volume of information requiring backup and storage. With around 4000 staff employed in 200 branch offices across NSW, the DECCW’s multi-vendor legacy storage system was reaching the point where it was difficult to handle the increasing growth in storage requirements.

David Schneider, Director of Information Management and Communication Technology for the DECCW, said, “Our data storage requirements continue to grow almost exponentially, so we were looking for a flexible, scalable storage solution that was able to keep up with our growth and meet the high-availability requirements of our dispersed workforce.

"With the V-Series, NetApp offered us a high-performance, vendor-independent, unified storage solution which is simpler and easier to manage than our old system. NetApp has allowed us to work faster and improve efficiency, enabling us to more effectively meet the needs of our internal and external customers.”

In the past, to manage the expanding data storage requirements, the DECCW added more storage capacity as required. This was becoming unsustainable, particularly as backup reached capacity very quickly. Backups were also being duplicated across multiple sites, further exhausting the system.

A key element of the solution for DECCW was 100 x NetApp FAS storage systems to be installed across DECCW’s branch offices around the state. As part of this, NetApp has introduced data deduplication technology to reduce the amount of data being stored to disk, streamlining the backup process and reducing the amount of data being sent over the network. Snapshot technology was also introduced to improve efficiency and enable frequent point-in-time backups. These technologies helped solve the need for increasing storage demands, limiting the amount of storage space required and greatly improving disaster recovery capabilities.

David Schneider said, “We chose NetApp for several reasons. First, the NSW Government has undergone an ICT expenditure review, which puts pressure on all departments to seek ways to operate more efficiently. The NetApp solution offered us results for a very competitive cost, thereby helping us to meet our targets. Also, we needed a partner who could help us embrace web 2.0 and manage the growing volumes of data being generated. NetApp has provided a solution that has enabled us to solve several business issues we were facing and offers us the potential to generate significant business breakthroughs in the coming years. We expect the new solution will provide a substantial return on investment once the installation is complete, further improving our ability to consolidate data and significantly improve our disaster recovery and IT service capabilities.”

Peter O’Connor, Area Vice President for NetApp Australia and New Zealand said, “NSW DECCW is a great example of a customer who needed a simple, effective solution to generate significant improvements from its legacy storage environment. NetApp is pleased to be able to work with NSW DECCW help the organisation leverage value, speed and efficiency from its existing infrastructure.”

The NetApp solution will be rolled out in phases and is expected to be completed in two to three years, with 60 x FAS systems being implemented across NSW by the end of 2010.

The NSW DECCW is deploying two NetApp V3160HA storage systems at its head office and 100 NetApp FAS2020 storage systems at branch offices across the state.

Snapshot technology will enable DECCW to protect its data with no performance impact and minimal consumption of storage space. SnapManager for SAP, SnapManager for Oracle and SnapManager for Microsoft Exchange are automating complex, time-consuming processes associated with backup and cloning of these applications.

NetApp Operations Manager is delivering comprehensive monitoring and management. NetApp Protection Manager automates data protection operations.

NetApp SnapMirror replicates data from DECCW’s Sydney-based primary data centre, to its western-Sydney-based back-up data centre, protecting business-critical data.

NetApp FlexVol lets DECCW adapt quickly to changing storage needs, allowing the storage team to create and resize virtual volumes quickly, so storage can be added where and when it’s necessary without disruption.

NetApp FlexClone is deployed throughout DECCW’s development and testing environment.