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Xentrall is a groundbreaking UK public sector partnership between Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council and Darlington Borough Council. The goal of the partnership is to create a more cost-efficient organisation for the delivery of key back office transactional services to both unitary authorities which have a culture of innovation and service improvement. Xentrall works jointly with both Councils supporting them in the delivery of ICT, Design and Print, HR, and Finance.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
The public sector is undergoing unprecedented change as welfare reforms and tough austerity measures prompt local authorities to form strategic partnerships with other service providers such as housing trusts, hospitals, charities, and emergency services. This has placed additional responsibilities on all involved and, combined with increasing expectations from citizens, has made the local authority's role in society the subject of increasing focus.

In these challenging times, ICT has a critical role in producing savings by generating greater efficiencies and by supporting local authorities in transforming the way they operate and deliver services.

When Xentrall launched in May of 2008, one of the areas that was expected to generate significant, multi-million pound savings over the 10-year agreement was the creation of a joint ICT platform to support many of the new combined services. ICT covers the traditional technology-based service delivery elements - such as network, server, data storage, end-user and application - as well as customer-facing roles like account management, business analysis, service centre, and training. The new ICT function also provided strategy, architecture, process excellence, information governance and security services across a diverse range of applications and use cases.

From its inception, it was essential that Xentrall operated with complete transparency and to the same quality standards as any critical supplier to the public sector. As such, Xentrall ICT Services are certified to both ISO/IEC 27001:2005 Information Security Management and ISO/IEC 9001:2008 Quality Management System standards. These exacting benchmarks require that the ICT departments take active measures to protect the integrity, security, and reliability of their services delivery. To this end, the ICT team maintains an extensive backup and recovery platform including an off-site disaster recovery position. However, with the merger of the two council ICT infrastructures into a single entity, it was clear that its business continuity position needed to evolve to meet greater data volumes.

SOLUTION
In 2011, Xentrall Shared Services started to experience performance issues with its production SAN, namely the very limited throughput within the daily backup window. The backup was running over into the next working day, causing significant operational issues and forcing resources from ICT to be rerouted in order to ensure the backup processes were successfully completed. "The cause of the issues was not immediately apparent," explains Chris Oates, Strategic Technical Architect at Xentrall. "We began a deep dive and route cause analysis and came to several conclusions, and we decided that we should bring in an external expert to both validate our findings and help re-architect the current infrastructure to solve the problem and build a more resilient platform."

Working closely with Trustmarque, an experienced system integration specialist, Oates and his team began a process of upgrading elements of its existing SAN to try to deliver the increased throughput needed to meet the backup requirements. However, it became clear that simply upgrading the SAN would prove a costly alternative and might only provide a short term solution. With Xentrall proving to be a success, it was also likely that its ICT function would grow as more manual council functions switched over to ICT-based equivalents and the successful Xentrall model expanded to help other local public sector bodies.

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