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One of California's major state agencies faced a challenge familiar to most state government IT people—increasing demand for services, restricted budgets, and crowded data centers. The agency had wall-to-wall servers, so adding more capacity the old way—individual servers and Direct Attached Storage (DAS)—just wasn’t viable.
To solve the problem, IBM client managers teamed with Jeskell to propose IBM BladeCenters with a shared storage pool. The idea of modular blades required a fundamental shift in how the customer uses IT resources but the clear advantages—high density computing with lower administration costs—made it very appealing.
Over the course of a few months, Jeskell and the IBM team met regularly with the customer to review the BladeCenter approach, scope out solution parameters, size the solution, and recommend appropriate configurations.
“The price for the new BladeCenters,” adds Garcia, “was far less than for conventional servers and DAS.” Included were 26 individual blades; an IBM FAStT 900 Storage Server; an IBM EXP 700 Expansion Unit with 96 disks of 73.4 GB capacity each; an IBM LTO UltraScalable Tape Library for high-capacity offline storage; and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for backup and archive operations.
According to a customer spokesperson, “Jeskell helped us understand this new approach and showed us how we could mitigate any risk. We're very pleased with the results.”
