South Wales Police is migrating to a Storage Area Network (San) as part of an overhaul of its technology infrastructure.

The project will consolidate the force's 150 disparate servers, improving backup capability and overcoming the reliability problems that were affecting the old architecture.

The system was in desperate need of an overhaul, said South Wales Police IT systems manager Andrew James.

"Basically our backup solution at the time was creaking," said James.

"We were seeing our administration overheads going through the roof and we were seeing a lot of failures in the infrastructure."

The newly-implemented central storage platform enables South Wales Police to share data more easily.

And users are also able to recover documents themselves, reducing dependency on helpdesks.

The force's Microsoft Exchange server infrastructure and several Oracle applications are already running on the San. And ultimately all systems will be migrated onto the platform.

SWP is working with storage integrator B2net to roll out different phases of the project throughout 2007.