NPIA
The National Police Improvement Agency (NPIA) provides support and expertise to frontline police services. The agency covers many aspects of modern policing, including IT, information sharing, forensics and recruitment. The NPIA was established in 2007 to consolidate the operations of its predecessors, the Police Information Technology Organisation (PITO) and Centrex.
The Challenge
To ensure the continued delivery of an efficient, cost-effective service, the NPIA required a number of solutions to meet the aims of streamlining and maximising the performance of their IT environment. These included migration, storage and hardware implementation.
The Solution
SysMicro administered the consultancy services that enabled the NPIA to achieve the desired fluidity within their systems and hardware infrastructure. The IT Company looked to their tried and trusted partnerships with the biggest names in software and hardware manufacturing, to provide the setting up of mail clusters on HP hardware and the deployment of and subsequent environment migration to Microsoft’s Exchange Server 2007.
SysMicro also ensured satisfactory automated backup procedures were in place through the implementation of HP Data Protector Software on all servers, with files duplicated to a secure, off-site virtual tape library. To reduce expenditure and improve overall efficiency, the servers were virtualised and deployed to a HP Blade infrastructure, allowing for safe and secure data management and future scalability.
As part of an ongoing contract, SysMicro continued to provide the NPIA with IT services and solutions until 2010, when it was announced that the department would be phased out. Over the course of three years, SysMicro used their knowledge and expertise to deliver and implement duel EVA 8100 disk arrays; rack mounted Blade servers; a Virtual Tape Library (VTL); the Data Protector Backup Software; and the hosted VMware Server platform.
