Portage County
StoreVault lowers the cost of operation for Portage County
Customer Overview
The County Office of Portage in Wisconsin oversees 17 towns, 9 villages, and includes the city of Stevens Point. The county’s thirty-five odd departments handle legal, education, entertainment, health, finance and other issues for residents. In the last few years, Portage County has seen a steady growth in population, from the 67,182 in 2000.
Customer Challenges
The county employed over 600 staff, and the IT department had established a network environment that included 16 IBM xSeries and iSeries servers, providing 4TB of storage. While the iSeries stored all transaction data generated by business functions like law enforcement, payroll, and court system and so on, 4 xSeries servers were used for user file shares containing project and operation data for each department. These were in the form of Excel, Word and PDF documents. The IT department had established a Symantec Backup Exec server for weekly, full backups that went to a Exabyte LTO3 tape device. The tapes were then sent to an offsite location, 5 miles away for data protection.
While the system worked, it wasn’t efficient. Weekly and daily differential backups were slow, and file restores from tapes would take anywhere between 15 to 60 minutes. A home-grown scripting tool was used in accessing the data on scattered servers, and that entailed learning and maintaining the tool.
Since data was replicated weekly, recovery to the last minute of a disaster was not possible, and in the case of a disaster, restoring data from tapes was a time consuming process, often taking 12 hours and more.
The County’s server technology was 5 years old, where the terabytes of data were handled over slow processors and inadequate memory. Moreover, the maintenance support for servers had been discontinued at the OEM, and the County was due for a replacement phase.
The IT department at Portage County wanted to replace these servers with more efficient and robust technology. They were also looking to cut costs by keeping internal storage to a minimum.
Solution: StoreVault S500
Craig Flagel, IT Manager and his team of network technicians were seeking a state-of-the-art technology that would fit their needs. They reviewed various NetApp and IBM solutions, in which process they heard of StoreVault, a NetApp division. NetApp and IBM were considerably more expensive – costing at least twice that of a comparable StoreVault product. Craig also liked StoreVault’s features such as RAID 6, snapshot and replication, all of which could resolve some of his other problems.
Craig now uses two StoreVault servers with six 500 GB drives, and the licenses for CIFS, Snaprestore, and Replication. All user file shares now reside on the StoreVault while the xSeries servers have been decommissioned. Regular snapshots are taken for backups and data is then replicated offsite, 5 miles away. He also has an LTO3 drive directly attached to StoreVault for NDMP backups to tape, as a second layer of disaster protection.
In the future, Craig plans to transfer his application server data in iSeries to StoreVault as well. StoreVault can work as the central data point as server hardware is required only for application installation, and with lesser data requirements, he sees the solution reducing his investment in server and storage.
Customer Experience
Craig says “Experience with StoreVault is very positive. It delivers what was promised. We protect data using snapshots, and replicate it with centralized data using CIFS, exactly what we were looking for.”
He gladly adds “Delta Communications was instrumental in ensuring that Portage County was well taken care of. They helped in installation and configuration of the system. They helped configure the original specs and obtained special pricing for us”. Craig is also very positive about his experience with the StoreVault technical support team.
Customer Benefits
StoreVault Advanced Protection Architecture including Snapshots, RAID 6 and Replication helped Craig Flagel at the Portage County achieve peace-of-mind about his data protection. Users can now restore lost data using Snaprestore within 10 seconds, compared to the 15-60 minutes previously. Users are given training on restoring a lost file, and don’t have to request the IT team for restores, saving even more time.
Replication was a big plus as the data gets replicated to another StoreVault located 5 miles away connected through fiber. This gives the County the opportunity to role-swap in case of a disaster.
Servers no longer need to be purchased with large storage capacities. They can be connected to StoreVault and have a pool of large, dynamically allocated storage on demand, keeping costs to a minimum.
Craig is now geared up with the latest technology to handle the county’s growth.
