HP announced that the State of California Department of Water Resources (DWR) replaced its Sun and Dell servers with an HP Converged Infrastructure to reduce energy consumption while saving $2 million in maintenance fees.

With HP BladeSystem technology, the California DWR was able to move to a 95 percent virtualized environment, reducing its physical servers from 600 to 160. In combination with HP Thermal Logic, which reduces energy and cooling costs, the agency improved energy efficiency, performance and scalability.

The California DWR operates and maintains the nation's largest state-built water and power development and conveyance system, furnishing water to 25 million residents and 750,000 acres of farmland. Changes to the state's water management program expanded the department's scope of work from a single line of business to other focus areas, including environmental management and flood safety.

"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."

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 proactively manage the health and power consumption of its physical and virtual servers. This has reduced labor costs by 35 percent and maintenance costs by 45 percent. These servers also offer maximum performance in dual-processor technology and the latest Intel Xeon processors for the agency's virtualization requirements and high-performance computing applications.

To meet state environmental initiatives, California DWR used HP BladeSystem c7000 enclosures with 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.

California DWR's new infrastructure also allowed for the effective deployment of a shared services platform, helping on its journey to become an Instant-On Government that is readily available whenever it is needed.

HP's premier client event, HP DISCOVER, takes place Nov. 29 - Dec. 1 in Vienna, Austria. The event showcases how organizations can get started on their Instant-On Enterprise journeys.