Andrew Sales, the council's special IT projects manager, said that after going to tender for an integrated infrastructure solution, A$450,000 (US$337,000) was spent on new HP Proliant servers and an EVA3000 SAN.

Sales said the benefit of storage virtualization is the "black box" nature, whereby the size of a partition can be allocated across many, for example 30, spindles in the SAN.

"It will level the partition across 30 drives for the RAID level [so] it's just a virtual partition," Sales said, adding if more discs are added the partition will span the entire set.

"With other vendor solutions you have to stick disks in groups and they will be allocated to server. This is just a black box."

In addition to reducing the server count by seven, Sales said the main benefit is performance.