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TDL plies Dell tech for Campbelltown City Council infrastructure overhaul

Cutting report extraction time down from around 12 hours to minutes

Thomas Duryea Logicalis (TDL) has overhauled Campbelltown City Council’s legacy three-tier data centre environment with hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), bringing significant performance improvements with the new tech. 

The Sydney-based local council, which is responsible for the City of Campbelltown’s infrastructure and community facility management and services over 157,000 residents, moved over to four Dell EMC P-series VxRail nodes and two Dell switching gears from Dell Technologies. 

As a result, the new infrastructure has sped things up considerably. For example, SQL database patch processing time now takes less than 20 minutes, as opposed to being an overnight process. 

The time it takes for the local council to perform basic tasks has also been reduced, with report extraction time going down from about 12 hours to minutes. 

The ICT services provider's handiwork has also been cost effective for the local council, as the new infrastructure reduced its annual maintenance and support bill by $100,000 when compared to its legacy infrastructure. 

Its system administration team has pivoted away from maintenance and support, and instead is focusing on technology research contributing towards transformation projects. 

It also uses less energy, taking down average power consumption from 30KW to 8KW, which in turn brings down its power bill by about $15,000 per annum. 

When the nodes were introduced, there was an immediate mitigation of reliability and performance issues in the local council’s primary data centre, Dell Technologies claimed. 

Furthermore, the infrastructure was able to integrate with its private cloud-based secondary data centre for the support of the local council’s business continuity capabilities. 
 
This proved to be particularly beneficial when half of its approximately 1,000 employees shifted to remote working within a week — an otherwise impossible task on the older infrastructure, Dell Technologies claimed. 

The decision to go with Dell Technologies infrastructure came as the local council and TDL underwent a 12-month data centre review across multiple vendors, with the vendor's tech standing out, according to Campbelltown City Council’s head of technology Ari Aich. 

“I did extensive research on various vendors in the industry, but Dell EMC VxRail was a clear winner for our council,” he said. 

“This modern and cutting-edge solution, paired with its ability to support and scale up and down is closely aligned to our strategic principles – to sustain and build smart environments and remain as an innovative council. 

“TDL’s extensive knowledge within the industry and their extremely capable consulting and advisory team re-affirmed, through genuine insights, the decision to adopt Dell Technologies and its Dell EMC VxRail platform as the best fit-for-purpose solution.” 

The revamp came as the local council’s three-tier environment, consisting of storage, compute and network, kept holding the council back, with the reliability and limitations of the legacy infrastructure preventing it from moving on technology modernisation opportunities.

This is the latest example of Campbelltown City Council's technology refresh, with Canberra-based managed service provider Citadel Group overhauling its content management solution with Citadel-IX in June.