Met Office

A new dawn

Met Office safeguards millions of daily forecasts with scalable mainframe environment designed by Computacenter and IBM

The Met Office is the UK’s National Meteorological Service. As a world leader in providing weather and climate services, it employs more than 2,000 people at 60 locations around the globe.

Objective

The Met Office collects around 200 million weather observations a day, which power a range of public forecasting services, commercial products and mobile apps. To ensure this data can be served up 24x7, the Met Office utilises a highly available and scalable mainframe environment. Increased demand for weather intelligence and the deployment of a new supercomputer prompted the Met Office to embark on a mainframe upgrade.

Solution

The Met Office partnered with Computacenter and IBM to design and deploy a mainframe platform that could support future growth. Computacenter assisted with the technical build and pre-installation checks to safeguard business continuity. The new environment, which includes two mainframes with a total of 44 cores and 200 terabytes of attached storage, combines a range of IBM and open source technologies and will support a range of new Met Office applications and initiatives.

Outcome

With more than 35 per cent additional mainframe capacity, the Met Office can process greater volumes of weather data in a shorter timeframe. This not only safeguards the delivery of millions of daily forecasts and briefings, but supports future growth. As well as increasing operational agility and efficiency, the mainframe upgrade has reduced total cost of ownership.