City of Fremantle

The City of Fremantle is navigating significant change both physically and culturally. The physical work environment is changing with the City’s main office scheduled to be demolished and a new office building constructed in its place. The project is expected to take 2-3 years, so whilst construction is underway the new mobility based work culture will be tested, with staff working from various locations across Fremantle’s central business district.

When the new building opens in 2020, mobility will continue to be a core work orientation within the office, with all workspaces designed for activity-based working. This approach is to enable staff to work via their chosen device in suitable work areas depending on the task at hand, be it quiet solo work or project based collaboration. In addition, 20% of staff are expected to be on the road all the time - this includes parks & landscape officers, community safety officers, animal rangers, roadworks and depot staff - so getting the right foundation in place for a mobile workforce becomes a critical success factor.

As the City of Fremantle continues to transition to a sustainable and vibrant modern city as part of its Strategic Community Plan, it’s vision for how data is accessed and managed is key to providing residents with more services and a better experience overall when dealing with the council. Quick, secure access to council data anywhere,anytime on any device puts services at the fingertips of the community and staff, delivering the most efficient service possible.

To support the transition and enable a fully mobile future, the City required a high performing infrastructure to match their planned data strategy.

The IT team at the City of Fremantle engaged with several leading vendors during the tender process,. After an exhaustive comparison of options, the City selected FlexPod solution that was recommended by storage, compute and virtualisation implementation specialists, Xpanse.

The FlexPod solution demonstrated outstanding performance and capabilities, along with a proven track record of deployments delivered by Xpanse. A critical deciding factor for the selected solution included how data could be efficiently managed through deduplication rather than relying purely on the technology, with a surprising guarantee.

The City of Fremantle originally specified a 60TB requirement in their tender. However, with the storage efficiency benefits delivered through deduplication, the solution could easily allow for the requirements to be revised to 40TB – a 33% reduction! This was proposed by Xpanse and NetApp along with a performance guarantee that ensures that the City will still deliver on their mobility and performance requirements.

The guarantee was based on the years of real world experience that attracted the City of Fremantle to the solution recommended by Xpanse.

All production workloads were migrated to an all-flash FlexPod Datacenter solution.The pre-validated converged infrastructure solution from NetApp and Cisco provides the City with the agility to provision for high-demanding applications as required.

For backup and disaster recovery requirements, the NetApp FAS2554 hybrid storage system has been implemented at an offsite data centre that will support native and cross-site backups along with complementary software backups.

Both systems are configured to allow for future growth over the next 5 years.