Fosen IKT Enhances Municipal Services with IBM FlashSystem
By IBM
Leveraging Data-Driven Services for Municipalities
Fosen IKT, a shared services organization for five municipalities in Norway, aimed to improve citizen experiences by providing data-driven services. Facing exponential growth in demand and data volume on their shared services platform, Fosen IKT deployed IBM® FlashSystem® 9100 to ensure the performance, availability, and scalability required for continuous growth.
Business Challenge
Fosen IKT provides data-driven services for five municipalities in Norway. The challenge was to meet customer demand for new services without impacting the performance of existing applications.
Transformation
Fosen IKT replaced its outdated storage environment with IBM FlashSystem 9100 and IBM Spectrum® Virtualize. This upgrade helped the organization increase throughput and create room for continued application growth.
Results
- Application response times reduced by 50%, helping Fosen IKT meet stringent SLA requirements.
- Achieved 29% data compression, reducing storage space requirements and accommodating data growth.
- Reduced energy consumption, saving operational costs.
Providing Quality Services to Citizens
Local governments worldwide are adopting digital services to improve citizen experiences. Offering these services often requires significant investment, making it difficult for smaller cities to provide them. To address this, five municipalities in the Fosen region of Norway joined forces to create a shared services organization: Fosen IKT. Today, Fosen IKT provides data-driven services for each of the cities in the cooperative.
Terje K. Nilsen, ICT Consultant at Fosen IKT, explained: "The municipalities in our cooperative serve more than 20,000 citizens, and our local government clients rely on our applications to effectively support these services. Our platform supports critical areas such as healthcare, so we must meet our clients' strict service level agreements (SLAs) for reliability and availability."
For years, Fosen IKT relied on a storage area network (SAN) that utilized older IBM technology. As the organization needed to meet growing service demands year after year, Fosen IKT realized its storage environment would soon be unable to cope with the explosive growth in data volume and speed.
Deploying a Future-Ready Storage Solution
To accommodate continuous data growth, Fosen IKT adopted an all-flash IBM FlashSystem 9100 solution to replace its tiered storage environment, enabling low latency and high throughput for all application workloads.
"Of all the solutions, we found IBM FlashSystem 9100 to be the best fit for our operational needs," explained Nilsen. "The solution is cost-effective, offers high performance and high availability, and includes IBM Spectrum Virtualize software, which makes it easier for our administrators to manage storage resources."
Nilsen added: "Furthermore, we have been using IBM storage solutions for many years with great success. We know IBM is reliable and its solutions can support our applications running smoothly around the clock."
Working with teams from IBM and IBM Business Partner Arrow ECS, Fosen IKT deployed IBM FlashSystem 9100 in just two weeks without disrupting its daily operations.
Nilsen commented: "We were impressed with the collaboration between IBM and Arrow ECS. Both companies worked side-by-side throughout the implementation, and we are confident that we can rely on them for future work."
For example, the Arrow ECS team helped redesign the storage environment using IBM Spectrum Virtualize to take advantage of thin provisioning. This allowed Fosen IKT to minimize storage requirements while ensuring applications continued to run smoothly. When applications reached their allocated storage limits, IBM Spectrum Virtualize automatically alerted them, allowing them to proactively allocate more space. The solution is also highly scalable, with capacity easily increased by adding additional modules.
"Our critical workloads on our accounting platform, such as payroll, budgeting, and financial reporting, are now 50 percent faster."
- Terje K. Nilsen, ICT Consultant at Fosen IKT
Improving Citizen Experience
By deploying IBM FlashSystem 9100, Fosen IKT enhanced the scalability, availability, and throughput of its storage environment. With the new solution, the company can meet its SLA requirements amidst continuous year-over-year growth in data volume and speed.
Nilsen stated: "IBM FlashSystem 9100 significantly increased IOPS [input/output operations per second], helping us reduce end-user response times for many applications. For example, our critical workloads on our accounting platform, such as payroll, budgeting, and financial reporting, are now 50 percent faster. This allows us to improve the customer experience and help our clients provide responsive services to citizens more easily."
In addition, Fosen IKT has significantly reduced its power and data center footprint requirements. The IBM FlashSystem 9100 solution reduced the storage footprint from half a rack to two rack units.
"IBM FlashSystem 9100 not only reduces our operational costs but also helps us save valuable space in our data center," explained Nilsen. "Although we only provide data-driven services to the municipalities, we also rent out our data center rack space to other companies. Freeing up more rack space increases our rental inventory, which helps us generate more revenue."
By utilizing data compression and thin provisioning, Fosen IKT can maximize its storage capacity and create room for future growth.
About Fosen IKT
Fosen IKT is headquartered in Rissa, Norway, and provides IT services for a cooperative of five municipalities in the Fosen region.
Solution Components
- FlashSystem - 900, V9000
- Spectrum Virtualize
Next Steps
To learn more about IBM FlashSystem 9100, contact Per Robert Fjelly at Tlf (92098386, pfjelly@no.ibm.com), an IBM Business Partner, or visit: ibm.com/it-infrastructure/storage/flash
Arrow Electronics ECS Norway AS provides IT services and solutions for businesses across Norway. To learn more, visit: ecs-no.arrow.com
