CrimTrac is an Australian Government agency that provides the technology required to provide police services and law enforcement agencies with access to the accurate information needed to solve crimes. It provides national information sharing solutions to support the effective operation of law enforcement across all states and territories.

The challenge

When it was established, CrimTrac developed and inherited a number of different systems relating to law enforcement support. The organization had aging IT infrastructure that was fragmented and difficult to manage, with availability to data becoming an increasingly significant issue.

CrimTrac required a services partner to quickly consolidate existing technologies and build a new infrastructure platform to support 24x7 data access for authorities across the nation. The new infrastructure, in the form of two new data centers, needed to provide improved availability of information systems and mission critical services, as well as reliable and tested IT service continuity.

As a government organization, CrimTrac’s infrastructure overall also had to adhere to the recommendations outlined in the Gershon report, providing maximum capability with the greatest efficiency by creating a highly consolidated and cost effective IT environment

Our answer

We designed, supplied and implemented a new, highly resilient, reliable and scalable enterprise-wide ICT midrange infrastructure that not only met the organization’s stringent requirements for information security, but also provided significant ongoing cost savings. The solution was designed and deployed using virtualization, clustering, and data management technology from EMC, VMware, Red Hat and Oracle.

The infrastructure supports a two data center model that enhances the capability to respond to IT service continuity incidents ranging from component failure through to major disaster scenarios. In part, this has been provided by constructing an enterprise data management platform using EMC technology including EMC CLARiiON, EMC Networker, EMC Avamar, EMC Data Domain, EMC RecoverPoint, and EMC Centera.

All Microsoft Windows based servers used for supporting the information sharing and corporate requirements have been virtualized.

Rather than pre-purchase headroom, which is both expensive and reduces flexibility as the organization’s needs change, our solution now has Oracle RAC running on the Intel-based Red Hat infrastructure, which enables CrimTrac to grow the computing power as needed.

We have rationalized and consolidated the infrastructure to use less vendor products and reduced vendors to a single source for the server, storage and virtualization layers.

A success story

CrimTrac now has a highly available and secure environment that is fault-tolerant and addresses the risks associated with major disaster scenarios. The data management capability ensures that data is protected through replication and made available across two data centers, ensuring the police and law enforcement agencies across Australia have fast and reliable access to criminal data.

Reducing the number of vendor products has reduced the complexity of the environment, which translates to less operational risk. This simplified environment has also created a significant reduction in administration and management support costs.

Increased server virtualization has significantly improved flexibility and scalability. CrimTrac now has cost effective infrastructure that can be scaled up or down to meet demand. The new virtual environment includes information sharing across all corporate systems, providing further flexibility and availability, as well as a reduction in its carbon footprint. This also means reduced time and risk for provision and delivery of future enhancements to existing systems.

The system has enhanced disaster recovery, which can be retrieved from multiple points and tiers across systems. The introduction of virtual tape libraries has also significantly reduced restoration and recovery times, as well as the overall operational costs of physical tape management. Where possible we reused existing systems and hardware to reduce the overall costs of the project and further reduce the impact on the environment.

We continue to support CrimTrac providing 24/7 access to its service desk as the primary point of contact for any technical issues with the system. Our Technical Service teams remain on call to provide hands on support to resolve issues from either its Canberra offices or on site as required.

Key benefits

  • Provided a more secure and resilient solution for highly sensitive data
  • Increased efficiency and overall IT cost savings
  • Rationalized and consolidated infrastructure
  • Reduced complexity
  • Mitigated the risk associated with significant disaster scenarios
  • Significantly improved the availability
  • Reduced carbon footprint

CrimTrac now has a highly available IT environment to support business continuity. Its infrastructure has been consolidated and optimized to provide enhanced scalability and flexibility, as well as reduced complexity of systems.

“We urgently needed a major update of our IT infrastructure that would provide maximum capability, with minimum expenditure. CGI supported us step-by-step through this transformation and showed us how to get more out of our infrastructure, delivering in incredibly tight timeframes.” Darin Brumby, CIO CrimTrac

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