Overview
Challenge
- Ensure 70,000+ citizens can access online municipal services rapidly and reliably, 24/7.
Solution
- Introduce multi-site active-active storage array clusters for high availability and near-instant failover in case of disaster.
Outcome
- Reduce RTO to minutes and RPO to zero, streamline infrastructure management and enable innovative AI projects.
“Hitachi Content Platform is a fast, flexible and easily extensible solution. We quickly started using it for more workloads than initially planned, it’s a very stable and cost-efficient platform.”
Victor Manuel Solla Barcena, , Head of Information Systems Services, Ayuntamiento de Avilés
Challenge
Ayuntamiento de Avilés (Avilés City Council) is the governing and administrative body of the municipality of Avilés in northern Spain. The city council provides a range of municipal services and manages cultural and sporting events for its 72,000 residents.
Like every city council in Spain, Avilés aims to provide municipal services both face-to-face and through digital channels, fostering accessibility and high service quality. For years, these critical services were hosted at a single data center, which created operational and cybersecurity challenges.
“We had a single point of failure—if there was ever a serious problem at the data center, all municipal services would suffer downtime,” explains Victor Manuel Solla Barcena, Head of Information Systems Services at Ayuntamiento de Avilés. “The team also found it increasingly difficult to manage the infrastructure, our recovery time and recovery point objectives [RTO and RPO] were not optimized, and our storage arrays did not support modern cyber-resilience technologies such as storing immutable copies of data.”
The city council has always been at the forefront of digital transformation initiatives. For example, to boost sustainability, it has switched to a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), where employees use Raspberry Pi single-board computers instead of power-hungry workstations. To achieve its mission of becoming a smart city while maintaining compliance with ever-stricter data protection regulations, Avilés would need to take a similarly innovative approach to its data storage strategy.
Solution
To support around-the-clock operations, Ayuntamiento de Avilés chose to replace its existing Dell storage infrastructure with Hitachi Vantara Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) arrays, deployed across two data centers. A key reason for Avilés’ choice of Hitachi Vantara was ease of management. Barcena confirms: “As with other government organizations, we do not have unlimited resources, so easy infrastructure management is essential to our small team.”
In a first for the public administration sector in Spain, Avilés used Hitachi global-active device (GAD) to provide active-active replication between the two sites, supporting around-the-clock availability and enabling swift recovery in case of disaster. In addition, the Hitachi solution enables Avilés to create immutable snapshots of its data for backup purposes—helping to protect against ransomware attacks and other cyber threats.
The project was supported by Hitachi Vantara partner Empatiza Consulting, who helped design and integrate the architecture.
“Empatiza are a key technology partner that know us and our strategy,” comments Barcena. “Working with them is very easy and we can always trust that they will complete projects flawlessly and on time. Their capabilities combined with high-quality Hitachi Vantara technologies give our organization confidence.”
The new infrastructure hosts the central Oracle database that supports the city’s main digital services, as well as the Citrix virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for the city council employees. To streamline operations, the Avilés IT team is using Hitachi Ops Center, which acts as a single pane of glass for storage provisioning, management and observability across both data centers.
Outcome
With Hitachi Vantara technology, Ayuntamiento de Avilés has the robust storage infrastructure it needs to provide services quickly and reliably to tens of thousands of citizens.
“We have doubled our storage capacity compared to the previous architecture, and the availability of the platform is close to 100%, even during peak times,” says Barcena.
Using the GAD architecture, Avilés strengthens its ability to recover in case of disaster. Running recovery tests, the Avilés IT team consistently records a recovery time objective (RTO) of a few minutes and a recovery point objective (RPO) of zero. The reliability of GAD also proved critical during a major incident.
“We had an incident where one of the data centers lost connectivity completely due to an error during electrical maintenance,” says Barcena. “But the rest of the organization was not impacted in the slightest. Services carried on working as normal. There is no better proof for the effectiveness of Hitachi Vantara technology.”
As one of the most innovative councils in Spain, Ayuntamiento de Avilés is a leading member of AI initiatives such as the Alía Project—a Spanish large language model (LLM) aimed at helping public administration bodies raise efficiency. To provide additional flexibility for these types of innovative projects and to support future growth, Avilés is now considering upgrading to the latest Hitachi VSP One Block for Mid-sized Enterprises, which will boost performance and capacity even further.
Barcena concludes: “We can sleep at night knowing that our Hitachi Vantara infrastructure is providing us with security and high availability. You can’t ask for more from a storage platform.”
“We have doubled our storage capacity compared to the previous architecture, and the availability of the platform is close to 100%, even during peak times.”
Victor Manuel Solla Barcena, Head of Information Systems Services, Ayuntamiento de Avilés
Industry
Location
- Spain, EMEA
Hardware
Software
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