Providing a resilient, reliant and scalable enterprise-wide ICT
CrimTrac is an Australian Government agency that provides the technology required to provide police services and law enforcement agencies with access to the accurate information needed to solve crimes. It provides national information sharing solutions to support the effective operation of law enforcement across all states and territories.
The challenge
When it was established, CrimTrac developed and inherited a number of different systems relating to law enforcement support. The organization had aging IT infrastructure that was fragmented and difficult to manage, with availability to data becoming an increasingly significant issue.
CrimTrac required a services partner to quickly consolidate existing technologies and build a new infrastructure platform to support 24x7 data access for authorities across the nation. The new infrastructure, in the form of two new data centers, needed to provide improved availability of information systems and mission critical services, as well as reliable and tested IT service continuity.
As a government organization, CrimTrac’s infrastructure overall also had to adhere to the recommendations outlined in the Gershon report, providing maximum capability with the greatest efficiency by creating a highly consolidated and cost effective IT environment
Our answer
We designed, supplied and implemented a new, highly resilient, reliable and scalable enterprise-wide ICT midrange infrastructure that not only met the organization’s stringent requirements for information security, but also provided significant ongoing cost savings. The solution was designed and deployed using virtualization, clustering, and data management technology from EMC, VMware, Red Hat and Oracle.
A success story
CrimTrac now has a highly available and secure environment that is fault-tolerant and addresses the risks associated with major disaster scenarios. The data management capability ensures that data is protected through replication and made available across two data centers, ensuring the police and law enforcement agencies across Australia have fast and reliable access to criminal data.
Reducing the number of vendor products has reduced the complexity of the environment, which translates to less operational risk. This simplified environment has also created a significant reduction in administration and management support costs.
Increased server virtualization has significantly improved flexibility and scalability. CrimTrac now has cost effective infrastructure that can be scaled up or down to meet demand. The new virtual environment includes information sharing across all corporate systems, providing further flexibility and availability, as well as a reduction in its carbon footprint. This also means reduced time and risk for provision and delivery of future enhancements to existing systems.
The system has enhanced disaster recovery, which can be retrieved from multiple points and tiers across systems. The introduction of virtual tape libraries has also significantly reduced restoration and recovery times, as well as the overall operational costs of physical tape management. Where possible we reused existing systems and hardware to reduce the overall costs of the project and further reduce the impact on the environment.
We continue to support CrimTrac providing 24/7 access to its service desk as the primary point of contact for any technical issues with the system. Our Technical Service teams remain on call to provide hands on support to resolve issues from either its Canberra offices or on site as required.
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