Hyper Convergence Infrastructure, Back Up, and Disaster Recovery Solution

The CMA has embarked on an ambitious cloud first transformation strategy with a need to restructure and review the existing storage, compute and backup infrastructure in time of an office relocation from Holborn to Canary Wharf in 2019, reducing physical infrastructure from two datacentres into one. This strategy seeks to reduce our physical hardware overall associated costs and resources required to run two data centres.

The current infrastructure platform has organically grown over the years, a result of a merger between the Competition Commission and the Office for Fair Trading in April 2014, the datacentre infrastructure was never designed for cloud scale and requires new technology to follow best practices and deliver application performance and availability across a modernised hybrid infrastructure. At the time that his merger took place the HCI solution was not widely known or available as an option for the CMA IT department to pursue.

CMA has also moved applications to Microsoft's Public Cloud, Azure, which requires an improved data management strategy, for both production and backup data. We are seeking an HCI hardware solution that provides value for money in the long term and aligns with the CMA's ICT strategic aims to ensure our IT systems are secure, future facing and provide the best customer experience for our staff. We are also seeking a back up and DR orchestration solution that best meets the needs of an organisation of our size and type, taking into account our hybrid cloud strategy.