Local Government

Public Safety Department Improves Its Own Protection

The public safety department of a large Midwestern city faced an unsafe situation with its own IT systems: several of the operating systems and applications on the aging collection of nearly two dozen servers were no longer supported. Data couldn’t be stored efficiently because the storage area network (SAN) was at capacity, and the department did not have space or power available to expand its infrastructure. These limitations left the department no way to effectively back up its systems or recover them after a disruption.

Since the IT system couldn’t get bigger, it had to get more efficient. Merrimac Solutions recommended and delivered solutions that gave the department true disaster recovery capabilities that it didn’t have before, and provided systems and storage infrastructures that were easier and less expensive to operate and manage.

First, the department virtualized most of its systems using the VMware environment running on new HP ProLiant G6 servers. By virtualizing, the department consolidated 22 physical servers into four, which considerably reduced space, cooling and power requirements. As part of the upgrade, the mishmash of operating systems was replaced with fewer, newer versions, which are more reliable and less time-intensive to support.

The server savings enabled installation of a new XioTech SAN with 10TB of enterprise fibre channel storage and 128TBs of less expensive SATA. Working with Merrimac, the department prioritized it storage needs so data and files could be stored in the most cost-effective manner.

Merrimac worked closely with the department to help it develop an understanding of its protection and recovery needs, set an appropriate recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) and develop an overall DR strategy.

The tiered storage infrastructure supports highly responsive backup and recovery capabilities. Using Symantec Backup Exec for Intel-based physical and virtual machines, and integrated Unix backup utilities, the systems are backed up to a Data Domain appliance, which stores and de-duplicates the data in-line. As a result, the department can meet its backup window by backing up to the appliance, and use the integrated replication to back up data to an off-site disaster recovery location. In addition, all virtual systems are using the integrated Xiotech replication to the DR site over the fibre infrastructure, which supports synchronous SAN-to-SAN replication to meet their RTOs/RPOs.

The department can now recover backup files or restore complete systems from either its on-site SAN or over the network from its DR site. Before the upgrade, it hadn’t even conducted a full DR test because of the amount of time that would have been required to rebuild and recover systems.

Besides guiding development of the DR strategy and systems, Merrimac also provided hands-on support for developing the overall upgrade plan, selecting hardware and software and training system administrators and support staff. By the end of the project, the public safety department had disaster recovery capabilities it didn’t have before, plus an IT infrastructure that was more reliable, more responsive and took less time to support. The project put the department and the citizens it protects on much safer ground.

Needs:

  • More storage capacity
  • Disaster recovery capability
  • Updated IT infrastructure

Challenges:

  • No space or power available to expand data center
  • No more storage available in current SAN
  • Aging, disparate server and OS platforms

Solutions:

  • Upgrade to newer, more efficient servers
  • Use virtualization to consolidate servers
  • Upgrade SAN and implement tiered storage architecture
  • Off-site replication to disaster recovery site
  • On-site and off-site backup

The Merrimac Advantage:

  • Virtualization recommendation enabled 22 physical servers to be consolidated to four
  • Server upgrades resulted in fewer operating systems to support
  • Tiered storage strategy provided most cost-effective mix of long-term and short-term data storage.
  • Organization gained first true DR capability without having to increase the size of its IT infrastructure.


Want more information? Let's talk
FacebookTwitter LinkedIn ||Share this page

Certifications:

Symantec logoVMware logoXiotech logoCitrix logoMicrosoft SMB SpecialistDell Partner Specialists