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The BTP's CTO has promised there will no major upgrades in the Olympic year
The British Transport Police is undergoing a virtualisation transformation in advance of the London 2012 Olympics
Next year, the British Transport Police will face one of its biggest challenges in living memory. Some 5.3 million visitors are expected to descend on the capital for the London 2012 Olympics, and it is the BTP’s job to guard their safety while on the public transport network.
At the same time, the BTP, like all police forces, has had its budget cut, in its case by 3.3% for the next budgetary year. “The [BTP] will have to be creative as it faces the challenge of delivering the same level of service on a reduced budget,” the chairman of the British Transport Police Authority said of the cuts last December.
The force is currently undergoing a radical transformation of its IT infrastructure, prompted in part by that budget reduction. In the words of chief technology officer Cliff Cunningham, the plan is to “virtualise everything we can”.
But with a strict deadline to meet – Cunningham has promised that there will be no major IT upgrades next year – the BTP is undertaking that virtual transformation faster and under more pressure than most.
Servers and storage
The prelude to the BTP’s virtual transformation came last year with the preliminary roll-out of the Police National Database, a system that allows police forces to share information about suspects. The BTP needed some infrastructure to host the system, and Cunningham was loath to put more servers in the data centre at its force headquarters in Camden, London.
“We created a virtual environment for the PND programme, and we gained some experience from doing that,” he recalls. Following that experience, Cunningham drew up a plan to virtualise a significant proportion of the IT infrastructure, including servers, storage and desktops.
It began by upgrading and virtualising all of the servers at its Camden data centre in February this year (using VMware). That part of the project is complete, and some of the server capacity that was freed up will be reused at a secondary data centre in Birmingham.
Cunningham knew that virtualising the IT infrastructure would have an impact on the amount of data it needs to store in the data centre. When inviting potential suppliers to tender, he asked them to provide estimates for the likely storage footprint of the planned system. Armed with this information, he sought out a storage system that could support that footprint.
“When we first looked at what was on the market, we realised that if we bought a box that wasn’t big enough, in many instances we’d have to throw it away and buy a bigger box,” he recalls. “That’s not economically viable – we needed a solution that would allow us to bolt on extra capacity as we grew.”
That led Cunningham to storage virtualisation provider Compellent, which has been acquired by PC maker Dell since the BTP first engaged with the company. Dell Compellent’s deduplication features mean that the force has not yet had to acquire any extra storage capacity to support its virtual transformation.
Next >> Beyond utilisation improvements
