Edmonton Police Service

Edmonton Police

The police service is enjoying improved data insights, reduced backup times, and substantial cost-savings.

The pandemic expedites the need for modernization

A new reliance on remote network access capabilities, video communication, and collaboration tools would help staff conduct work safely — both internally and with the public. But the move to a mobile-enabled workforce wasn’t something EPS had planned for. The implications on infrastructure had to be considered.

This fundamental change highlighted the need to transition from a legacy system (with inadequate provisioning) to a modern platform that would enable rapid deployment and expansion — without extended procurement cycles.

EPS needed built-in agility to aid staff in responding quickly to a rapidly changing environment and new technologies — whether that be a video solution, cameras installed around the city, or other innovations coming into operation.

To facilitate more efficient use of police resources, EPS had recently implemented a new electronic content management system that stores evidence in a more organized, streamlined fashion. Evidence was previously stored in many different forms — everything from physical pieces of paper, to video on CDs, to audio recordings — in disparate systems. Having data centrally and uniformly housed frees up officers’ time so they can better serve Edmonton citizens. 

But with the workload for digitally converting and storing massive volumes of evidence increasing, the question became: Where would this petabyte-scale data be stored? The legacy system simply wouldn’t suffice.

SOLUTION

Scality RING software-defined storage on the HPE GreenLake Cloud Services platform

Reduces backup times by 76.9%

Achieves multisite resiliency with data center rapid recovery

A new solution achieves more storage, flexibility and cost-savings

The need to transition to a flexible, scalable, and cost-effective solution prompted a major overhaul of EPS’ storage infrastructure environment.

The deployed solution includes the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, HPE scalable object storage with Scality RING, HPE 3PAR StoreServ 8000 storage, and the HPE Apollo 4510 Gen10 and HPE Apollo 4500 system, as well as Veeam for backup.

The EPS is currently storing 1.4 PB of data on its new storage platform. The HPE + Scality solution acts as a base layer for all the virtual infrastructure that supports EPS’ new digital asset management system. While the HPE GreenLake platform provides mission-critical, scalable performance, Scality RING offers the flexibility required to scale out the platform, store unstructured data, and put it onto performant hardware that cost-effectively meets the organization’s needs.

Thanks to the pay-as-you-grow flexibility of HPE GreenLake, EPS doesn’t have to outlay so much capital at the beginning for things they don’t need. Switching from a CAPEX model to a consumption-based model will save about CAD$2 million over the next five years. And with Veeam rounding out the overall solution, EPS has reduced backup times from 13 hours to 3 hours.

Since deployment, EPS’operations team hasn’t experienced any challenges with performance reliability.