WellData have over 20 years of Database Management experience, specialising in support for local authorities. We have a proven track record of effective partnerships with councils across the UK, and we look forward to becoming ‘part of your IT team’.
“WellData has made the day-to-day running of the system and major upgrades faster, and less disruptive to
the service and provides the in-house team both IT and Revenue with expert advice and peace of mind”
– System Administrator, Rushmoor Borough Council
Despite having huge social and economic responsibilities, most Councils are left to face budget challenges and significant decreases in government funding, and Rushmoor Borough Council is no different.
As a result, the Council has embarked on an ambitious modernisation programme, entitled Rushmoor 2020. Rushmoor Borough Council was in need of a way to effectively maintain and manage its Oracle databases, including an annual Oracle health check, and Revenue and Benefits software iWorld application support.
These services and applications are critical for the Council to be able to effectively manage its revenue and provide the level of care required by the community.
Yet, without internal database management expertise, and in consideration of the high cost of employing and training new members of staff, the Council needed to find a trusted, external partner.
Not only that, but the partner needed to be able to provide superior database and application consultancy services at an affordable price.
That’s when WellData came into the picture.
Introduced by a neighbouring Council, WellData presented Rushmoor Borough Council with a comprehensive solution that, in the words of the Council’s System Administrator Sarah Giles “has made the day to day running of the system and major upgrades faster, and less disruptive to the service and provides the in-house team both IT and Revenue with expert advice and peace of mind”
Addressing the Council’s needs, WellData offered an Oracle database managed service package that included regular monitoring, incident detection, correction and tuning of the systems to provide an efficient and reliable service, both on-site and remotely.
WellData also proposed an Application support service, including patching and management of the iWorld revenues and benefits application used by the Council.
The service management offered by WellData included an ‘all risk’ policy in a comprehensive managed service – including all necessary on-site work, testing of off-site Disaster Recovery Plans, and more.
Whilst the Council’s IT team provides effective first and second line response, it recognised the need for third line support to be delivered in a financially sustainable way.
WellData’s outsourced database administration and support service has proven “extremely successful especially around patching, release management, and incident management”.
According to the Council, their process prior to the relationship with WellData was unreliable, while now the IT, Digital and FM services enjoy 24/7 support provided on a critical system, that is in their own words “cost-effective, flexible and very responsive”.
“WellData were critical in aiding a hardware refresh of our on-premise Oracle DB real estate. The
hardware refresh necessitated a switch of platform, as part of DCC’s long term goals to reduce the number
of platforms that we support. WellData managed the process from cradle to grave ensuring that we stayed within our
Oracle licensing agreements. WellData were on hand to perform the migration of the Production Environment outside
of our core corporate support hours”
– Applications Analyst, Devon County Council
Devon County Council has relied on WellData for the management of their database estate for over 8 years. At the very beginning of the project talks were held about the opportunity to change their servers and migrate their Oracle Databases running on AIX servers to up-to-date Windows Servers as well as the daily Business-as-Usual database management that the current estate required.
Often migrations appear to be very complex projects. This is not surprising, considering that a migration frequently involves changing the operating system, storage and database version all at the same time, whilst keeping the downtime to a minimum.
This is why migrations tend to be postponed indefinitely.
Devon County Council’s database estate was getting to the stage where risk was starting to get too high: in June 2021 the operating systems were nearing end of support, the servers were at a point where the cost of maintenance was becoming too expensive, and the Oracle version needed upgrading.
When the request for a migration to newer and better performing servers and databases came through from the Devon County Council’s IT department, the WellData team was ready.
Being well acquainted with the Council’s database estate, the team knew that there were currently five databases hosted on only two servers. This situation had developed over time and was not ideal as it complicates the daily management of the databases and prevents database replication should that be necessary.
For this reason, the very first recommendation was to build five servers, one for each database. These five servers had to be identical, built to the same specification, so that if a server failed it would be possible to replicate a database on to another server; this also allowed for an easier and more effective database management regime.
The migration process was completed in less than five months with no disruption to Devon County Council’s operations: the servers were built, Oracle 19c installed, daily maintenance plans established, each database was cut over, testing carried out and the migration completed.
In the words of Graham May, Application Analyst, of Devon County Council(DCC):
“[…] WellData managed the process from cradle to grave ensuring that we stayed within ourOracle licensing agreements.
WellData were on hand to perform the migration of the Production Environment outside of our core corporate support hours”
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