American Digital’s strength is its ability to understand our customer’s immediate and future data center needs. It then delivers end-to-end solutions to meet those needs. Recently, the company was able to help the city of Madison, Wisconsin achieve improved service levels and increase their data storage expansion capabilities.
The City of Madison maintains the operations of 38 departments overseeing this bustling, capital city. Two separately located data centers control the nerve center of communications among these vital departments, such as, Public Works, Transportation, Fire, Police and the Mayor’s Office. These data centers are both production sites, allowing for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery. The ability to retrieve and provide current data is vital to the proper operations of all the departments.
VIRTUALIZATION
Like many forward thinking organizations, the City of Madison had implemented virtualization as a way to boost application availability, improve hardware utilization and streamline its IT infrastructure. Over the past 7 years, the city implemented close to 90 virtual servers, with 20 host servers – 13 of which are VMware ESX hosts.
Chris Luedert, Madison’s IT Manager, knew they needed a storage system that could easily support their critical applications on SQL databases while being flexible, easy to manage and most importantly, able to address scaling to keep up with increasing storage demands. Luedert explained, “In the past, we had mostly Direct Attached (DA) storage and with that, we kept running out of storage in a 6-12 month time span.”
American Digital sales and solution architects met with Luedert to discuss the features and benefits of the solution – HP StorageWorks P4000 G2 SAN. The American Digital Solution Architects discussed how the Storage Clustering would allow them to consolidate multiple storage nodes into pools of storage. All available capacity and performance is combined and available to every volume in the cluster. In this way, as storage needs increase, the HP P4000 G2 could scale performance and capacity on-line.
COST-EFFICIENT STORAGE SOLUTION
For an entire network of city departments, minimal down-time, higher service levels and cost savings are critical factors to ensure smooth operations of city business. American Digital was able to assist the City of Madison by implementing the HP P4000 SAN solution with fiber connections in their two main data centers. The result was a cost-efficient, scalable storage solution that allows for much improved expansion capabilities and avoids expensive upgrades. The customer was pleased to have achieved true cost savings, minimized down-time and improvement of their File & Print service levels for their users. IT Manager, Chris Luedert commented, “We couldn’t be more pleased with the new Storage Solution or with American Digital. Whenever we had a need, their response was immediate and thorough.”
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