Maricopa Fire District
StoreVault lets fire district manage massive growth dependably
Customer Overview
The city of Maricopa, Arizona is experiencing hyper-growth and the population is expected to exceed 100,000 by 2010. The Maricopa Fire District currently operates four service stations and one administration office, and plans six new permanent fire stations in the next two years. This expansion will also bring additional thoroughly trained, excellently equipped, and professional firefighters and personnel.
Instantaneous information retrieval can be a matter of life and death. The IT team automated functions such as fire ground command, pre-fire planning, building inspection records and personnel records. However, the expected growth and projected capacity posed new challenges.
Customer Challenges
The Maricopa Fire District has been growing faster than a desert wildfire.
File sharing needs as well as application requirements for Microsoft Exchange and SQL server grew from 250GB to 600GB almost a 140% increase in
12 months. Staffing needs jumped 500% in the last year. MFD started their project with 67 full time employees, 27 computers and 7 Windows and Linux servers, with several Buffalo Terastation NAS products used as disk-based backup devices. 600GB of data was shared over CIFS and NFS for Windows and UNIX clients, but the NAS devices could only handle 10 users at a time.
Sometimes it took nearly 10 minutes to access data. Adding local storage to existing servers meant approximately 2 hours of downtime. There was no offsite backup and no way to grow file and application storage quickly. The district was up against a capacity wall and the IT staff was feeling the heat. The Windows backup utility targeted jobs on a CIFS share but performance limitations meant that restores were very slow. Individual files could take up to 60 minutes and server recovery a whole day. In a profession requiring 5 minute response times, this was unworkable. Backup, restore, disaster recovery and growth were all serious problems.
Solution: StoreVault S500
Ben Graff, IT/Communications Director at MCSE, needed a device that was expandable, reliable, served at least 250 users, and could replicate data across the network on a local government budget. He also wanted file serving support and block-level application support for his blade servers. Ben had considered a Snap Server 520 but was disappointed with the high price and the additional $6500 for replication software. When Chuck Griffin from StoreVault reseller QCM Technologies suggested a StoreVault S500, Ben was immediately sold on the multi-protocol support, replication ability, scalability, performance and price.
Ben implemented a StoreVault S500 with eight 250 gigabyte drives RAID-DP, connected to network using both NFS and CIFS for Linux and Windows file sharing. Norton Ghost backs up server images to the S500, which uses Snapshots to backup and restore file data instantly and frequently.
Maricopa Fire District has a StoreVault S500 in each new fire station facility and replicates data between sites. In case of disaster, data is always available at an alternate location, resulting in the best of both worlds for recovery and performance.
Customer Experience
Ben says "This equipment has been ideal for our needs. I am a hesitant shopper and StoreVault came along at the perfect time when I had exhausted all other avenues of finding a useable solution." He adds, "I have been extraordinarily pleased working with QCM Technologies during the last year. With a StoreVault everything is so easy to do! It took me 4 minutes to create a LUN and attach it to a server even though I had never done it before. The interface is so intuitive that anyone can have it dropped in their lap and use it."
Customer Benefits
Backup performance, response time and recovery time has exceeded expectations. Advanced Protection Architecture provides much greater reliability and scalability without downtime. Best of all, Ben meets all of his needs with one single product, simplifying management, deployment and planning during a time of hectic growth and resource demands.
Ben Graff and the Maricopa Fire District are focused on putting out real fires, not the ones in their IT environment.
