Why Stavanger Municipality trusted their critical data to colocation and why they think all municipalities should do the same
A few years ago, Stavanger municipality decided to decommission their own on-premise data center and trust all their critical data to Green Mountain. Now they have both a 50m2 data room at the SVG1-Rennesøy mountain hall facility as well as a disaster recovery solution at RJU1-Rjukan in Telemark. The municipality is very pleased with the partnership and services.
About Stavanger Municipality
Stavanger is a city and municipality in Norway. It is the fourth largest city in Norway. The municipality is responsible for delivering reliable public services to its population of 150 000 people. These services all rely on IT systems that cover a wide range of services. For instance, patient medication, school exams, economic transactions, wages, patient signal system, public information, and door access systems.
The challenge
IT is a critical factor for municipalities in delivering public services. Like many public organizations they managed their own on-premise data center to maintain control. However, in 2015 they had experienced several down-time incidents. Mainly caused by problems relating to power and cooling. Simultaneously, the building housing the data center was also due for rehabilitation. As a consequence, they had to make a choice: Build a new data center og go for colocation? Stein Ivar Rødland, IT manager in Stavanger municipality, contacted Green Mountain to explore the possibilities: “We still wanted to have the data center in proximity. Fortunately, Green Mountain is located only 30 minutes outside the city. We knew the company by a solid reputation. Nevertheless, we wanted to make sure they could deliver the quality and efficiency we wanted.”
The solution
Based on their requirements, Green Mountain recommended a 50m2 data room at the SVG1-Rennesøy mountain facility. In addition, the client requested a back-up solution. So, a smaller rack set-up at RJU1-Rjukan was selected as a Disaster Recovery solution. Thus, the municipality could “lift and shift” everything from their old data center to the new location. They have also purchased services from the “Smart hands” team on site. They perform maintenance tasks and so forth. In other words, there is little need to visit the data center physically as everything is controlled remotely.
Progress / Results
- They avoided the costs of building a new data center and have predictable operating expenses instead.
- They can now focus on their core activities. There is no worry about uptime og other infrastructure aspects of their data center.
- The municipality now has a data center with higher security, reliability, cost-efficiency, and not at least – flexibility to grow. When the municipality was consolidated with two other municipalities in 2020, there was a smooth transition to integrate them all in the same data room.
To be honest, I believe all municipalities should use a colocation provider, which is unfortunately not the case now. I do not see why an IT department should build competence on data center operations when there are plenty of other tasks to focus on. Cost-wise it is also a more favorable solution.
Stein Ivar Rødland, IT manager in Stavanger municipality