After a series of ugly incidents in the data centre, which were the result of overheating, Maribyrnong city council knew it was time to get serious about its failing infrastructure.
The council, which borders the city of Melbourne and has 63,000 residents and 3,000 businesses, was managing a data centre with 23 servers, a multitude of UPS devices, four disparate racks from different vendors and a domestic air conditioning unit.
The UPS units had insufficient capacity, providing the council with zero uptime in the event of a power outage, according to Mark Bretherton, the local government authority's network administrator.
He said valuable time was wasted with IT staff managing each UPS unit and rack individually as well as maintaining a mass of cables.
"The large domestic air conditioning units the council used to cool its data centre were inefficient and unreliable, breaking down on several occasions," Bretherton said.
"One incident occurred on the day I returned from holidays. I received a phone call saying there was a strange beeping coming from the server room.
"When I arrived, I discovered the temperature in the data centre had reached over 40 degrees. The optimum working temperature is 20 degrees."
Bretherton said even triple redundancy cooling failed to prevent the second overheating incident.
This is when one of the data centre's air conditioning units blew up, the second unit tripped the circuit breaker and the third unit couldn't cope on a particularly hot day.
"The overheating of the data centre equipment significantly shortened the life of several servers which subsequently had to be replaced," he said.
"After the second incident, we had to get serious. We decided to combine two projects - upgrading the UPS and data centre cooling solutions."
Bretherton said Maribyrnong council held a closed tender and viewed UPS and cooling products from three different vendors.
"But APC stood out because it offered a complete integrated data centre solution," he said.
"We decided to go with APC as it was the only vendor to offer a complete solution rather than just pieces. Also, we had used APC products in the past and had a very good run with them."
Following a site visit, the council went with a 20KW InfraStruXure solution, as well as two NetworkAIR cooling solutions, an environmental monitoring system and an additional 5KVA UPS for failover redundancy.
APC's InfraStruXure solution fully integrates power, cooling, and environmental management within a rack-optimised design.
Bretherton said it was all installed and operational within 36 hours.
"We now have redundancy on our UPS, cooling and hardware. Now if something fails, we have a spare of everything," he said adding that the solution also allows for 50 minutes uptime in the event of power failure.
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"If the power redundancy expires, the data centre equipment automatically shuts down.
"When the redundancy on our previous UPS expired the entire data centre would fall on its head, causing loss of valuable data and productivity."
The council can also double the amount of cooling the system generates when required.
"NetworkAiIR is a far more efficient cooling solution and uses a lot less energy," he said.
The environmental management system monitors temperature and humidity in the data centre.
Bretherton said humidity had been a problem in the old data centre and had caused corrosion in the servers over the years.
"We now have a centralised management system including remote access to the servers," he said.
"The system proactively alerts the IT team to any anomalies via SMS or e-mail. It allows the team to resolve issues before users even realise there is a problem and to avert system failure.
"We spend less time managing disparate racks and cabling.
"Rather than working in the spaghetti jungle, we have an environment that is manageable and allows our IT staff to work more efficiently. Plus fault diagnosis is so much faster."
Bretherton said it was also important to deploy a scalable solution.
"In the past seven years, our data centre has grown from three servers to 26. Part of the reason the data centre was in such a mess was because of how rapidly the network had grown," he said.
"We can now add to our network quickly, easily and cost effectively - it takes us three hours to set up a new server compared to two days."
Maribyrnong city council provides 80 different services to residents and businesses, including critical health and welfare services for families, elderly, youth, and people with physical and mental disabilities.
The council relies on IT to ensure these critical services are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The council's 800 employees are spread across 32 premises that are linked by a central data centre located in Footscray.