Seeking to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance workforce mobility without physical dependencies, Kinetic IT successfully managed the data centre relocation of a law enforcement customer’s 95-square-metre facility. The project resulted in significant performance improvements and licence cost savings, with minimal disruption to the organisation’s critical 24/7 operations throughout the relocation process.
Quick stats
- $14 million savings from project estimated over 5 years
- 566% increase in power capacity (18KW to 120KW)
- LEED-certified green building project
Protecting public safety with modern IT services.
Maintaining continuity of services for this law enforcement agency is critical. The agency is tasked with maintaining public safety and managing emergency responses 24/7 for a local population of over 6.6 million citizens.
Operating a vast array of mission-critical IT systems that support functions such as real-time emergency response systems, intelligence sharing, and criminal investigations databases, significant disruption to the organisation’s IT operations—because of the data centre relocation—would directly impact the safety and well-being of the public.
Finding time to address ageing infrastructure and rising operational costs while modernising their IT environment saw the need to engage a specialist technology partner, Kinetic IT.
THE CHALLENGE
Balancing innovation with security, consistency and data sovereignty.
On-location data centres have both advantages and disadvantages. Physical facilities provide greater control over data infrastructure, hardware, and software, ensuring consistency and oversight. For government organisations like our law enforcement customers, on-premises data centres offer isolated networks and essential data sovereignty, especially when handling highly sensitive information and adhering to strict security protocols.
However, these facilities come with significant drawbacks. Data centre infrastructure is known for its high resource consumption, ongoing maintenance costs, and lack of scalability. In addition to these challenges, the project required minimal business impact due to the nature of the customer’s 24/7 operations.
Our law enforcement customer was motivated to relocate and modernise their data infrastructure, reducing their physical footprint to become more sustainable, streamlined, and high-performing. This relocation also provided invaluable visibility of at-risk services, enabling decision-makers to anticipate necessary improvements.
THE SOLUTION
Relocating to a new state-of-the-art data centre facility.
With the customer, Kinetic IT developed an approach to establish a new primary data centre facility, balancing the drive for innovation with the critical delivery of public safety services. This included relocating the majority of the customer’s active primary ICT infrastructure, including servers, storage, network, and services from incumbent providers. The customer’s reduced dependency on an on-site data centre—instead of relocating to an off-site data centre—eased the impact of the physical office move on almost 6,000 of the customer’s employees.
Assessing risk.
We conducted a thorough risk assessment and implemented a phased data infrastructure migration approach to mitigate and control the risk of downtime and disruption. By incrementally replacing the network, compute, and storage systems, we could migrate the data infrastructure in stages, minimising business impact. Redundancy and backup systems, carefully planned downtime windows, comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) and contingency plans ensured that any potential disruptions were effectively managed.
With the customer’s stewardship and overall governance, Kinetic IT provided program leadership, project management, architecture, design, and technical implementation capabilities for this end-to-end data infrastructure relocation project.
Kinetic IT also performed a detailed audit of the customer’s primary data centre facility to assess the scope requirements for the new physical data infrastructure. This included expanding operational capacity within the data centre and establishing timelines informed by expiring leases and other business priorities. Preliminary work involved reviewing and recommending approaches to virtual or soft data infrastructure migrations for critical and at-risk services and applications.
Led by an onsite, dedicated expert, Kinetic IT worked with incumbent providers to develop and assure the primary facility’s infrastructure and services shutdown, startup, and test procedures.
Designing the new primary data centre.
Engaging an Equinix data centre to serve as the customer’s new primary facility, Kinetic IT specialists focused on interconnecting these data centres using PIPE dark fibre services, running PacketLight Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM). Additionally, Kinetic IT extended the customer’s provided Telstra WAN service to the new Equinix data centre, ensuring seamless connectivity and optimal performance.
Kinetic IT’s work included developing data centre designs for racks, power, and structured cabling and managing its commissioning, including aligning the build with the customer’s physical security requirements. This included a protective security policy framework standard that Kinetic IT’s data centre delivery had to comply with, such as secure access for personnel and physical locations.
A complete mapping of the services and application environment was undertaken to ensure the data centre relocation could be performed with minimal business impact.
Staging a shutdown: the benefits of testing your procedures.
A key part of any data centre project is ensuring that procedures are in place for a shutdown or decommissioning of the facilities. This is even more vital when you consider the possibility of an unplanned data centre outage, especially for government organisations. In the event of an outage, whether planned or unplanned, you want to have confidence that your procedures work.
With our law enforcement customer, we managed the staged ‘shutdown’ of the new primary data centre facility. Staging this process involved testing a series of steps:
- Un-racking and packing
- Secure relocation
- Re-racking and cabling
- Startup and testing of infrastructure and services.
By successfully staging a complete shutdown and startup, our customer now has a documented approach they can implement in response to an incident or if the need arises to decommission.
THE OUTCOMES
A green, powerful data centre for a new era of law enforcement.
Completed in 3 months, the data centre now covers 110 square metres, with a level three physical security cage and 120 kilowatts of power over thirty racks.
- The old data centre was 95 square meters (sqm), while the new one is 110 sqm. This represents a 16% increase in physical space, allowing for more equipment or better infrastructure organisation.
- The old data centre had a power capacity of 18 kilowatts (kW), whereas the new facility has 120 kW. This is a 566% increase in power capacity, enabling the new data centre to handle much higher energy demands and support more or higher-performance equipment.
- The new data centre is designed for 30 racks, and with 120 kW of power, this equates to 4 kW per rack on average. This is likely a significant improvement over the old data centre, which, with 18 kW total, may have had a lower average power allocation per rack.
The new data centre space was also designed to meet Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification standards, a globally recognised green building certification.
LEED certification ensures that the facility adheres to strict environmental and energy efficiency criteria. It promotes sustainability through the use of resource-efficient construction methods, renewable energy, water conservation, and reduced carbon emissions. This aligns with the customer’s goal of improving operational efficiency while reducing environmental impact.
THE NEXT PHASE
Ongoing enhancements & hyperconverged infrastructure.
In addition to coordinating multiple components of the end-to-end project, Kinetic IT managed the data centre relocation of a mainframe. During this process, Kinetic IT architected the future state technology environment to take advantage of modern hyper-converged storage infrastructure, which provided the dual benefits of significant performance enhancements and reduced annual licencing costs by approximately 25%.
The customer continues to engage Kinetic IT for tailored services, including project management of network and audio/visual services uplift in a 43-storey-high building.
For more information on Infrastructure and Network solutions by Kinetic IT, get in touch with us.
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