Who is Hovedstadens Beredskab
Hovedstadens Beredskab (HBR) is Copenhagen’s emergency service. It operates the emergency response telephone service and provides fire and rescue services in the Danish capital. The organization’s 900 employees and volunteers-600 of whom are firefighters-serve approximately 1 million citizens. HBR’s objective is to prevent, limit, and remedy damage to people, property, and the environment in the event of accidents and disasters.
The Challenge
HBR is the largest fire and rescue service in Denmark. To keep vital emergency services (112 in Denmark) running all day, every day, the organization must ensure that its IT infrastructure runs reliably 24/7/365. Søren Wojtynka, Team Leader Infrastructure and Support at HRB, begins: “We have extremely strict uptime requirements for our data center infrastructure. This hardware runs everything from our most critical 112 call-handling and emergency vehicle dispatching systems to back-office business and administrative applications. On the operative side, there is absolutely no room for downtime.” Previously, S0ren and his team monitored and managed infrastructure spread across two geographically dispersed data centers-a big responsibility for a small team. To free up resources, HBR decided to outsource data center operations to CCIT.
“We found it increasingly timeconsuming to keep on top of infrastructure management, so we looked for help from the experts.”
Søren Wojtynka
Team Leader Infrastructure and Support
Hovedstadens Beredskab
The Solution
HBR selected a managed infrastructure service from CCIT with 24/7 operation, support, and monitoring-including servers, storage, and backup. CCIT refreshed HBR’s data center infrastructure with Lenovo ThinkSystem SR630 and SR530 servers, ThinkSystem DM5000F storage, and ThinkSystem NE1032 switches, establishing a rock-solid foundation to support the organization’s critical services.
The Results
Today, CCIT manages both of HBR’s datacenters, with data and applications from the primary location backed up at the secondary site and vice versa. A third backup is stored in CCIT’s own datacenter. A dedicated team provides round-the-clock monitoring and will immediately alert HBR of any issues.
“We have a robust disaster recovery plan on place to ensure that, in the unlikely event of downtime at one site, we can keep critical services running with as little disruption as possible” says Søren Wojtynka.
CCIT manages everything from the physical hardware to virtualization, with HBR’s IT team responsible for the application layer. “They ensure that the hardware and firmware is always patched and up to date, which is one less thing for me and my team to worry about” notes Søren Wojtynka. “This means that we can focus on keeping critical applications running optimally.”
“Robust, reliable Lenovo ThinkSystem infrastructure backed by 24/7 monitoring and expert support from CCIT help us to keep Copenhagen’s 112 services running day and night.”
Søren Wojtynka
Team Leader Infrastructure and Support
Hovedstadens Beredskab
Why Lenovo?
CCIT represented a safe pair of hands for HBR, as Søren Wojtynka recalls: “it was clear from the outset that these guys knew what they were talking about. they’re experts in hardware and have a lot of experience managing datacenters, which gave us confidence in their proposal.”
Lenovo ThinkSystem servers and storage were highly recommended by the CCIT team for their reliability and uptime, and HBR was impressed. “Lenovo has an excellent reputation for reliability, which is our number one priority when it comes to hardware,” confirms Søren Wojtynka
“The critical nature of HBR’s services means that downtime is simply not an option. That’s why we recomended Lenovo ThinkSystem servers and storage; the hardware is super-reliable, and combined with our monitoring and management services, we’re confident of keeping HBR’s systems online around the clock.”
Christian Fischer
Pre-Sales
CCIT
