Leicester City Council ‘At a Glance’
- 6,000 IT users
- Supported from SunGard Availability Services’ Leicester Recovery Centre
- QuickShip and High Availability Recovery services supporting IBM AS/400 and SUN SUNFire platforms
Leicester is the largest city in the East Midlands and the tenth largest in the country. It supports a population of 280,000 across 28 square miles with three key services - Education and Lifelong Learning; Housing, Regeneration and Culture; and Social Care and Health.
In 2003 the council underwent its first Comprehensive Performance Assessment by the Audit Commission. While the council’s performance was judged fair, the assessment identified areas for improvement and a Best Value Performance Plan was produced to action these. This includes raising standards in the three key service areas of education, social care and health, and housing.
IT dependency
Service improvement is now a top priority for the Council and its employees rely on IT to help them achieve this mission. This dependency was proven when the supplier of a new IT system to the housing benefits service went out of business, creating a backlog of claims.
The Council has always recognised the key role technology plays in helping it to provide a reliable service to the people of Leicester. This is reflected in the service level agreement the IT team has with all departments to maintain IT availability 24/7. It therefore works with SunGard Availability Services to ensure essential electronic information is always available to its 6,000 IT users.
“As with all organisations, we are becoming increasingly dependent on IT and my team is committed to providing a seamless service at all times to our users. The Council departments are there to provide a public service that people rely on and IT plays a critical role in helping staff to achieve their goals.
“Once we made it clear how much the departments relied on IT, the Council members immediately recognised the important role a business continuity solution would play in improving the services we offer and quickly agreed to the investment we needed,” said Andy Sharpe, operations manager, Leicester City Council.
First choice
SunGard supports Andy Sharpe’s team from its Leicester Recovery Centre with both a QuickShip (previously Relocatable) and High Availability service. The location of the recovery location was a top priority for the IT team as they wanted support from a centre that was local to them.
“We didn’t want to travel miles if we needed to use the facilities of a recovery centre. While SunGard has a global presence as a company, it was also able to give us the support of a local recovery centre. When you are experiencing the stress of a system rebuild, the last thing you want to do is travel hundreds of miles to recover that system if your own building has been made inaccessible due to some disaster like a flood or fire,” said Sharpe.
(SunGard’s UK infrastructure of 20 recovery locations is supported by a national ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) network and ScaleNet, a high-bandwidth optical network supporting the London region and the UK’s largest purpose-built Information Availability and business continuity data centre. These networks link to the SunGard Global Network, meaning that 25,000 miles of network backbone link over 60 locations worldwide, providing locally delivered solutions backed up by a global capability.)
Rapid recovery
Two platforms currently support the Council’s applications. A SUNFire holds applications for Social Care and Health; Housing, Regeneration and Culture; and Education, while an IBM AS/400 supports the Finance departments and other Housing applications.
The QuickShip Service supports the SUNFire platform so that should this system go down, SunGard will ship replacement equipment to arrive at Leicester City Council’s site within 24 hours, in order to quickly recover data. If the Council’s site becomes unavailable, Sharpe’s team can relocate to SunGard’s recovery centre to rebuild the system from there.
“At first we considered a recovery period of up to 48 hours but as our users depend on the systems to carry out their work effectively we realised this wouldn’t be soon enough. The QuickShip service means that they can have access in half this time, often less. For the Council’s systems we needed recovery in minutes, rather than hours and decided on a High Availability Recovery solution,” said Sharpe.
SunGard’s High Availability service gives Sharpe’s team a dedicated computer room at the Leicester Recovery Centre. This holds an AS/400 from which the Housing and Finance Departments’ data is mirrored in real time from the Council’s live system. Should this system fail then it can be quickly recovered within one to two hours.
Testing proves its worth
In keeping with good practice recommendations, Leicester City Council tests its business continuity plan annually. The SunGard team works with the IT department to review the plan and ensure that all procedures are up to date and support any hardware or software upgrades.
The tests help Sharpe’s team to ensure that the recovery time is not extended, should they have to invoke, due to unforeseen changes in the IT system.
“If you never test your business continuity plan it simply won’t be worth the paper it’s written on when you have to invoke. The nature and rapid pace of IT development means that systems are always evolving. As they change so do their interdependencies, which means testing is a vital part of any effective business continuity solution. If the business continuity plan sits idle for years and an invocation occurs, you’re pretty much guaranteed any recovery attempts will fail. We therefore review our plan every time we test to ensure that all our systems can be recovered in the required timeframe,” continued Sharpe.
The IT team’s testing strategy was proved invaluable after a system upgrade. This was timed so that once the upgrade was completed a test of the business continuity plan would take place. The test was planned for three days, which could have been reduced to two but the SunGard and Leicester teams recognised the importance of taking the time to ensure everything was checked thoroughly and covered by the plan. During the test it became clear that the system upgrade had indeed had a major effect on their recovery plans and all procedures were rewritten.
“We anticipated that there would be some glitches due to the upgrade, which proves the importance of testing. Our mantra is ‘test, update and test again’ and we always play by this rule to ensure the business continuity solution will work for us if we should invoke. It’s pointless investing in a business continuity solution if it won’t support you when you need it at your most vulnerable time,” continued Sharpe.
Disaster strikes
Once again the importance of testing was proven when Leicester City Council was forced to invoke the High Availability service just weeks after it had completed a test. The AS/400 at the Council’s site failed and was switched over to the platform sitting at SunGard’s Leicester site. A full working system was made available to users inside an hour, with the critical applications running live on the High Availability solution for eight hours, allowing the IT team to rapidly recover their own system.
“As a local authority, it’s our duty to provide a reliable service to the public and we do depend on IT to do this effectively. If the Council’s staff can’t easily support the public it could have significant consequences. Also, in the eyes of the users their IT department will have failed them and we take pride in the level of service we deliver. When IT operations go down it hits everyone.
“We have developed a robust platform for all our applications. However, should they go down, SunGard has given us the confidence that we can switch over with minimal disruption to the Council’s services. The solutions we have in place give us ease of operation and control during a disaster and is also cost-effective, something very important to local authorities!” concluded Sharpe.
Leicester City Council is currently migrating more applications from the AS/400 platform onto SUN. It will then work with SunGard to increase the footprint at the Leicester Recovery Centre and provide High Availability support for an increased number of applications.