nash county government customer profile data center ... · nash county government had not ... dell...
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ChallengeNash County Government had not
refreshed its IT infrastructure in
several years. Storage administration
was constrained by inflexible storage
systems, so IT staff could not respond
to changes in storage requirements
without extensive overtime.
SolutionThe county is implementing a proven
solution with server virtualization
using Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers and
Dell Compellent Storage Center
SANs, Brocade switches and the
Dell KACE Family of Systems
Management Appliances.
Benefits• 25% of IT staff reclaimed for
research and development to
make IT more proactive
• Projected 20%-30% reduction
in power and cooling costs
• Up to 60% reduction in
server footprint
Application areas• Disaster Recovery
• Financial Services
• Green Efficiency
• Networking
• Services
• Storage Solutions
• System Management
• Virtualization
Customer profile
Company Nash County
Government
Industry Government
Country United States
Employees 700 (Full &
Part-Time)
Web site co.nash.nc.us
“If a database becomes corrupted or a server loses power, users are back in business within a few minutes. Tax professionals and other employees have the tools they need to serve the public expeditiously.” Bruce T. Harper, CIO/Director, Management of Enterprise Technology Services, Nash County Government
Nash County Government data center refresh improves productivity of IT staff by 25 percent
2
As responsibilities for IT managers increased,
however, budgets did not. For the data
centers that host and manage such a wide
range of diverse services, growth has often
meant a proliferation of siloed platforms
without a unifying architecture. To set up a
new service, the IT department frequently
bought a new server with internal storage
and implemented a dedicated infrastructure
with multiple single points of failure and
little redundancy.
Bruce T. Harper was familiar with this
picture when he came to Nash County
Government (Nash County) as CIO/Director
of Management of Enterprise Technology
Services, about a year and a half ago. Less
than an hour from Raleigh, North Carolina,
Nash County lies in the state’s Eastern
Coastal Plain. The government is made up
of 20 departments governed by a Board of
Commissioners. Due to lack of funds, the IT
infrastructure that supported the operations
of county government had not been
refreshed in several years.
Harper had encountered a similar situation
in his previous employment for another
county government. Having assisted in
providing a more solid foundation and
getting his previous employer started down
the right road, he was prepared to bring
that knowledge to his new position and
assist Nash County in making some of
the necessary steps in getting on that
same road.
His first step was to call Davenport Group, a
Dell Premier Partner that had assisted him
in transforming IT at his prior employer. He
asked Davenport Group for help in gathering
requirements and designing a new solution
for Nash County.
Technology at work
Services
Dell™ Financial Services
Dell Support Services -Dell ProSupport™ Mission Critical with four hour onsite response
Dell Compellent™ Copilot Support
Solutions
Dell KACE™ K1000 System Management Appliance
Dell KACE K2000 System Deployment Appliance
Hardware
Brocade FastIron SX 800 core switches
Brocade FCX624S-HPOE and FCX648S-HPOE edge switches
Dell Compellent Storage Center SANs
Dell PowerEdge R710 servers
Software
Dell Compellent Data Instant Replay
Dell Compellent Data Progression
Dell Compellent Dynamic Capacity
Dell Compellent Remote Instant Replay
VMware® vSphere™ 5
“We can do all our maintenance during the day, and no one knows the difference, with Dell Compellent.” Bruce T. Harper, CIO/Director, Management of Enterprise Technology Services, Nash County Government
Over the past decade, local county governments have been digitizing
their services to internal customers and citizens. Departments such as
taxes, emergency services, police, utilities and finance each required a
unique set of technologies.
3
Proliferating servers and single points of failure
“We were running a lot of outdated
technology with servers that were out of
warranty or going out of warranty,” says
Harper. “Instead of looking at the enterprise as
a whole, we were replacing equipment piece
by piece. We were managing approximately
55 servers, running off one core switch
behind one firewall, and our storage was very
quickly running out of space.”
Servers with internal storage and a few HP
LeftHand SANs accounted for the storage
infrastructure. Storage management was
inflexible and task-intensive, even on the
SANs. Once the storage was set up, it was
difficult to change.
Having a couple of two-day outages allowed
upper management to see that changes were
needed. “We had a power outage one time,
and it corrupted one of the databases on our
tax system,” says Harper. “We were down for
two days because the vendor had to rebuild
the database. We tried our best to minimize
downtime, but due to circumstances that
were out of our control, the outages were
becoming more common, which was
causing frustration for our users.”
Returning to a trusted partnerFor disaster recovery, the county paid a
third-party vendor to come in every evening,
take images of all the servers and databases,
and store the images offsite. “The service
becomes costly and poses security concerns,”
says Harper. “With the loss of data and files,
recovery could become cumbersome simply
because the third-party vendor has to be
contacted and Nash County then is subject
to their timeline in getting the data and files
restored. That could potentially take days
to complete.”
Harper knew from the start that a complete
refresh of the data center was necessary.
Working with Davenport Group, he decided
to reduce server sprawl and improve
availability with server virtualization using
Dell PowerEdge R710 servers and VMware
vSphere. Again, from previous experience, he
chose the storage solution that had brought
success in the past and purchased two Dell
Compellent Storage Center SANs with Series
40 Controllers and eight Fibre Channel front-
end interconnects.
Harper also evaluated solutions from HP and
EMC, but since he was already familiar with
Dell Compellent, the decision was easy. “Dell
Compellent was above and beyond the other
storage solutions we evaluated,” he says. “I
don’t have to worry about a forklift upgrade.
If storage grows, all we have to do is get
another enclosure and put the appropriate
disks in, and the data will be spread
intelligently across the whole disk array.”
The completion of the project is awaiting the
building of a new data center which has been
placed in the capital improvement budget for
projects requested, in the upcoming fiscal
year—a slower approval process than the rest
of the project, which is on a five-year lease
from Dell Financial Services. “The Dell lease
made the project feasible,” says Harper. “If we
had to purchase all the equipment outright, it
would have been difficult for the County and
probably wouldn’t have happened.” The fact
that Dell provided all the products through
a single contact also saved considerable
administrative time.
Improving performance while reducing server footprint by 60%According to Harper, Nash County is looking
to reduce the physical server footprint by
up to 60 percent over the next year by
virtualizing servers with VMware vSphere and
Dell PowerEdge servers. The reduction of
physical servers and the design of a new hot-
aisle containment cooling system will reduce
power and cooling costs considerably.
Users will experience an improvement in
application performance with a new core
switch and peripheral switches from Brocade.
Increased bandwidth with 10-Gigabit Ethernet
(GbE) connections between the core switch
and the peripheral switches and 1GbE
connections from the switch to the desktop
will eliminate latency in key accounting
applications, which had caused up to
10-second delays in response time.
“The county had not established a true helpdesk environment prior to now. The service desk staff is also being trained by Dell on how to run a helpdesk operation, so we should be able to hit the ground running.” Bruce T. Harper, CIO/Director, Management of Enterprise Technology Services, Nash County Government
4
Dell Compellent Data Progression software
for automated tiered storage helps maintain
storage performance cost effectively. “With
Dell Compellent Data Progression, less
frequently-accessed data goes to tier
three, but the user doesn’t experience any
degradation of performance,” says Harper.
“The most active blocks are automatically
moved to tier one. So we will be saving
money by not having to buy as much 15K
SAS tier one disk, without slowing down
response times.”
Saying goodbye to downtimeIn addition to high latency, users dealt with
low availability, waiting up to two days for
their applications to come back online in
some cases. Those problems will be gone,
according to Harper. “We take point-in-time
snapshots of key applications every 15 to 30
minutes with Dell Compellent Data Instant
Replay,” he says. “If a database becomes
corrupted or a server loses power, we take
the most recent Replay of the data, and users
are back in business within a few minutes.
The dual-controller configuration of the Dell
Compellent Storage Center SAN ensures that
there will be no interruption in availability for
expansions, and the redundancy provided by
VMware at the server level helps to ensure
that tax professionals and other employees
have the tools they need when they need
them to serve the public expeditiously.”
20 minute recovery for 911 dispatch facilityA second Dell Compellent Storage Center
SAN at a remote site provides a disaster
recovery solution for Nash County in the
event of a hurricane such as Floyd in 1999,
which brought torrential rainfall to Eastern
North Carolina and caused nearly every river
basin in the area to exceed 500-year
flood levels.
Using Dell Compellent Remote Instant Replay,
currently the primary site sends Replays
to the disaster recovery (DR) site every 15
to 30 minutes. “We are working to allow a
replication to take place every five seconds,”
says Harper. “If a catastrophic event hits our
911 dispatch facility here, currently we could
recover at our DR site with very little loss of
data in 20 minutes,” says Harper. “Our goal in
the near future is to have the DR site up and
operational in 12 minutes or less. Using the
previous technology, this would have taken
days, if it could have been done at all. The
Dell DR solution eliminates the need for the
outside vendor, which in turn saves funding
that can be used elsewhere.”
Users aren’t the only ones who will notice the
difference when the Dell solution goes live.
The IT staff will also get a break. “Whether you
need to redo a LUN or expand a volume, it’s
a very simple process with Dell Compellent,”
says Harper. “With the LeftHand models we
used, you could not go back and rearrange
a 200 gigabyte volume into four 50 gigabyte
volumes. You had to reconfigure the entire
storage device, regardless of how many
servers were attached to it. That work is very
time-consuming, so it has to be scheduled
after hours, in overtime. We can do all our
maintenance during the day, and
no one knows the difference, with
Dell Compellent.”
Three out of seven Nash County IT staff
members are trained to work with Dell
Compellent. “I’m expecting that we will free
up 25 percent of their time,” says Harper.
“That’s time we can allocate to research and
development so we won’t have to operate in
such a reactive environment.”
Another way Dell Compellent gives storage
administrators more flexibility is with thin
provisioning using Dell Compellent Dynamic
Capacity. “I can provision storage according
to current usage—not projected growth—
because I can add more capacity whenever I
want,” says Harper. “That defers purchases of
high-priced disk.”
Hello, help desk The new data center infrastructure will
give the whole Nash County IT staff even
more opportunities to work efficiently
with the Dell KACE Family of Systems
Management Appliances. Dell KACE K1000
System Management Appliance provides
an automated service desk, while the Dell
KACE K2000 System Deployment Appliance
performs inventory assessments, network
OS installs and disk imaging. “The Dell
KACE Appliances will enable us to be more
productive with automated tools,” says
Harper. “The County had not established a
true helpdesk environment prior to now. All
senior-level staff members have been doing
their jobs plus level-one troubleshooting. The
service desk staff is also being trained by Dell
on how to run a helpdesk operation, so we
should be able to hit the ground running.”
For its own peace of mind, the county has
Dell ProSupport Mission Critical with four
hour onsite response on the Dell servers. “We
haven’t had to use it, but it’s great to have the
protection there, along with Dell Compellent
Copilot Support,” says Harper. “They are
part of what this whole upgrade is all about:
building in redundancy and partnering with
people who understand what we need in
order to provide citizens with the efficient
local government they pay for.”
For Davenport Group, Nash County is part of
a bigger picture. Says Paul Clifford, president
and co-founder of Davenport Group: “IT
needs have gone through the roof for local
governments, and financial resources are
decreasing. The saying ‘Do more with less’
has been familiar to local government IT
teams for a long time—and that’s why Dell is
such a good fit. Working with Dell solutions
such as Compellent and EqualLogic, we’ve
helped more than 25 local government
organizations get results similar to Nash
County, maximizing their ability to handle
growth and be flexible.”
Availability and terms of Dell Services vary by region. For more information, visit dell.com/servicedescriptions © October 2012. This case study is for informational purposes only. Dell makes no warranties—express or implied—in this case study. Reference number: 10009982
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