CASE STUDIES NEWCASTLE-UNDER-LYME BOROUGH COUNCIL

SystemCare helps Midlands Council cope with server growth issues

Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council, located in North Staffordshire, covers an area of approximately 81 square miles and has a population of around 125,000. Headquartered in Newcastle-Under-Lyme in Staffordshire, the Council employs over 600 people and provides a wide range of services to the public.

Specialised support

During the last few years the Council has invested heavily in IT infrastructure and in particular in servers to enable it to efficiently deliver services to the local population. Although the Council employs a dedicated and professional IT team to look after these servers it recognised that their skills needed supplementing. By partnering with an external organisation that could provide second line and specialised support that would ensure server downtime was kept to a minimum.

The Council has been a SystemCare customer since 2003. Steve Askey, ICT Business and Continuity Manager explains – "when we initially signed up with Nviron we only had 19 servers, but the flexibility of the contract has covered us through many changes and significant growth. We now have 60 physical and 45 virtual servers covered by our SystemCare agreement."

The flexibility of the SystemCare agreement has been key to its success at Newcastle as it has enabled the Council to achieve best value on the support contract for the IT platform that runs the entire infrastructure for the Council.

Proactive maintenance

As well as providing telephone support for any hardware or software problems on the servers, the agreement also allows for a proactive, onsite visit from an Nviron consultant once a quarter. During this time they thoroughly check the status of 10 named servers analysing key factors such as: event logs, disk space, performance and security. They then review the results with the Server support team at the Council and where necessary provide advice and recommendations on any actions required to prevent future problems.

Although a number of the most important servers are checked quarterly, this approach enables the status of all the other servers to be reviewed on a regular basis, ensuring potential downtime is kept to a minimum.

Steve Askey commented, "We are delighted with high level of support and assistance that we receive through our SystemCare agreement. The flexibility of Nviron has enabled us to design a support contract that fits our evolving needs.

In addition working with the Nviron consultants is easy. Their friendly approach coupled with their high level of knowledge and experience is the perfect supplement to our own in-house skills".