The Western Australian Disability Services Commission (DSC) will roll out a new disaster recovery capability as part of its business continuity plan.
The program incorporates three concurrent projects: server infrastructure, storage and virtualisation, and site and network infrastructure.
According to DSC documents, with a growing user base increasingly dependent on IT services to work effectively, the DR project would be an integral part of the Commission’s business continuity.
“In order to reduce the risk of financial loss, lost productivity and damage to reputation in the event of a disaster, the project plans to put in place the facilities, technologies and processes that will ensure that DSC’s ICT infrastructure will be both resilient to failure, and rapidly recoverable in the event of failure,” documents read.
The agency is currently tendering for VMware Enterprise Licensing Agreement for its primary and secondary sites including licences for VMware vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus, VMware vCenter Server 4 Standard, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager.
The decision to go to an enterprise licensing agreement is due to the agency’s current VMware ESX 3.5 deployment being out of maintenance and having insufficient licenses to cover all hosts at both the primary and secondary disaster recovery sites.
“VMware vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus is required for this project and it has been deemed that the most cost effective option is to procure a single VMware Enterprise Licensing Agreement (ELA) covering both the primary (West Perth) site and the secondary (DR) site,” the DSC documents read.
The DSC’s existing primary site infrastructure in West Perth has the following set up:
Existing VMware server environment
- 6 x VMware vSphere hosts (IBM x3850 M2 servers), each configured with: 4 x Quad Core Xeon X7350 processors @ 2.93GHz 32GB RAM 4 x 73GB 10K SAS HDDs Total of 24 physical CPUs
- VMware vCentre server (IBM HS21 8853G4M Blade), configured with: 2 x Quad Core Xeon E5430 processors @ 2.66GHz 4GB RAM 2 x 32GB SSD HDDs Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard 32bit
Existing storage system
- NetApp FAS3140A dual controller SAN, configured with: 7 x DS14MK4 disk shelves, each populated with 14 x 300GB FC disks 1 x DS14MK2 disk shelf, populated with 14 x 1TB SATA disks Fibre Channel (FC) storage networking
The DSC’s proposed secondary site infrastructure in East Perth will have the following set up:
VMware server environment
- 4 x VMware vSphere hosts (IBM x3650 M2 servers), each configured with: 2 x Quad Core Xeon E5530 Nehalem processors @ 2.4GHz, 48GB RAM, 2 x 73GB 10K SAS HDDs, Total of 8 physical CPUs.
- VMware vCentre server (IBM x3650 M2), configured with: 2 x Quad Core Xeon E5530 Nehalem processors @ 2.4GHz, 12GB RAM, 2 x 73GB 10K SAS HDDs, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Standard 64bit.
VMware environment
- VMware vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus
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