Tuesday 29 October 2013
The following statement was issued to the Guernsey Press on 29-10-13
Over the half term break the Education Department completed a project to move its servers and storage out of the Cable and Wireless Data Centre and into Sir Charles Frossard House.
This change was necessary because the servers and storage that were in use in the old Data Centre have reached end of life. This has been contributing to the poor performance of the existing IT systems that schools have been experiencing. A project was therefore put in place to replace the ageing technology. As part of this project, it was decided that this was the appropriate time to move into the States of Guernsey's Shared Services environment.
In addition to the data centre move, firewalls have been replaced and improved and a new backup solution has also been installed. All of these projects are part of the on-going investment that the States and the Education Department are making to improve the ICT available to all schools and the College of FE.
The move to the new Data Centre will provide:
- Potentially faster speed of access to data (depending on location and current status)
- Less system down time requested for out of hours working
- Improved backup and restore capability for business continuity
- Each Department will have an autonomous environment, more tailored to their specific business needs without additional cost
- A simplified environment
- More control over change as it can be Department specific and not 'one size fits all'.
- The shared service solution was also £500k cheaper than replacing the ageing kit with the current equivalent
- The move to the shared service solution also reduces the on-going operational costs associated with hosting the technologies in the old data centre
Specifically for Education it has also contributed to the Education FTP savings target.
The Department has already received some positive feedback on the change to the new Data Centre and has kept staff informed of progress at every step of the way giving more than one month's notice of the works and providing updates throughout the move.
All those involved - Cable and Wireless, JT, XMA (the Department's Managed Service Provider, ITU (the States of Guernsey's internal IT Team) and the Education Department are working to resolve any remaining issues.
