City of Sherwood, Oregon
City Government Improves IT Infrastructure to Handle Growth
Customer Overview
Sherwood is one of the fastest growing cities in the Portland-Vancouver, Oregon metro area. Its 15,000 citizens use 10 parks, 6 schools, a library, and a wide range of businesses. These citizens are served by 100 city employees.
Customer Challenges
Data needs were skyrocketing. Managing sprawling computing
equipment was diffi cult, and security and backup were major
concerns.
Photographic, historical, and CAD drawing records were
consuming increasing amounts of storage and demanding ever
better management tools. Like many municipalities, Sherwood
was looking to upgrade from paper archives to a more modern,
server-based electronic data storage system. However, a lack
of long-term planning combined with continuous growth had
resulted in haphazard management practices. The city’s 15
systems served a few terabytes of data from locally-attached
disks, including a frequently accessed Microsoft SQL Server
database.
Since data was in multiple locations, precise management and retrieval was very diffi cult, and the city required a signifi cant
amount of downtime whenever it needed to scale up. The need
to perform daily backups using CA BrightStor ARCserve and an SDLT drive with manual tape changing process introduced
further cost and risk. The tape subsystem was already at 80%
utilization and data growth required additional expenditures
on tape cartridges to ensure successful backup coverage. Administrators were tired of short term fi xes and were seeking
a long term solution for centralized storage.
Customer Solution
Brad Crawford (MCSA), IT manager for the City of Sherwood,
realized that he needed to centralize and standardize, so he started looking for a storage product that offered high capacity for a reasonable price. Brad
looked into HP storage solutions, the Dell/EMC AX150i, and Adaptec Snap Server, but found them
either too expensive or unreliable. Endurics IT Solutions, a local reseller, introduced him to the
StoreVault S500 and his interest peaked when he realized that StoreVault was a NetApp division.
Brad concluded his search. The City of Sherwood’s data has now been consolidated onto one StoreVault S500. Brad carved
up the StoreVault’s disk space to create NAS volumes and then migrated from local storage
using a straightforward copy and paste.
In the future, Brad plans to use Snapshot copies with his NAS volumes for instant backups, as
well as targeting his backup jobs to the StoreVault, reducing the need for daily tape backups
and manual tape management. Daily backups are now done to disk, and the Snapshot copies
are migrated to tape once a week for long-term backup. Immediate restores are now possible. His long term plan is to buy more StoreVault S500s and replicate data to other city offi ces for
disaster recovery.
Customer Experience
Brad found that installing and confi guring the S500 took him less than 30 minutes! He also vividly
remembers how customer support made the transition to the S500 a smooth procedure. In his
own words, “I had a wonderful experience with StoreVault customer support. They understood
and resolved my networking issues quickly and correctly, as well as suggesting appropriate
enhancements for better system performance.”
Customer Benefits
Brad says “I paid $5 per gigabyte of storage before moving to StoreVault. Now I pay $1 per gigabyte
with far greater reliability and enhanced features, which consolidated my environment. Every
dollar saved here can now be invested in further developing the city.” The city spent at least
$400 for 80GB of HP internal server storage each time they upgraded, went through agonizing
down time and churned through tapes. Brad is now confi dent that his storage demands have
been covered for the next five years, since any required upgrades will be invisible to users.
The City of Sherwood, Oregon, has averted storage gridlock and Brad Crawford is very pleased.
