HP Helps Biggest State Water System Cut 440 Servers

The California Department of Water Resources (DWR) has replaced its Sun and Dell servers with HP’s Converged Infrastructure, cutting energy use and costs.

HP says that with its BladeSystem technology, the California DWR was able to move to a 95 percent virtualized environment, reducing its physical servers from 600 to 160.

The DWR is also using HP Thermal Logic technology to manage power use by reclaiming trapped power and cooling capacity and safely capping server power consumption. The new infrastructure enhanced cooling efficiency by 50 percent and power distribution and efficiency by 40 percent, HP said.

The DWR operates and maintains the nation’s largest state-built water and power development and conveyance system, supplying water to 25 million residents and 750,000 acres of farmland.

HP said that consolidating to 160 HP ProLiant BL460c G6 and G7 and BL490c G7 server blades with HP Insight Control technology has allowed the California DWR to better manage the health and power consumption of its physical and virtual servers, reducing labor costs by 35 percent and maintenance costs by 45 percent.

“We needed a technology infrastructure that could enable us to meet regulatory demands as well as complete projects more quickly,” said Tim Garza, chief information officer, State of California Department of Water Resources. “Migrating from our aging Sun Solaris systems to HP BladeSystem tripled performance and capacity and provided four times faster transaction speeds for management applications and critical government systems.”