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Tuesday, November 27, 2012

City of Evansville, Indiana, Empowers IT Staff to Deliver More Services and to Deploy Them Quickly with New NetApp Storage Solution

NetApp Press Release:


City of Evansville, Indiana, Empowers IT Staff to Deliver More Services and to Deploy Them Quickly with New NetApp Storage Solution

SUNNYVALE, Calif. – November 27, 2012 – Near the banks of the Ohio River in the southwestern corner of Indiana, Evansville is a growing county seat that serves as the regional hub for the tristate area. The city’s Computer Services division is thriving as well, enhancing government operations, lowering costs, and leveraging innovative technology solutions for 62 city and county offices ranging from police departments to the Mesker Park Zoo.
Recently, the Computer Services division faced an impasse when its storage infrastructure reached capacity and was unable to keep pace with current demands—and certainly not with projected growth. Among other things, the Computer Services division needed a more robust replication capability to elevate its disaster recovery plan, and it needed more storage to enable a more efficient and resilient client environment. The division searched for a new storage solution that would allow it to leverage its existing investments instead of undertaking an expensive “forklift” upgrade, while centralizing its entire storage environment for IT management efficiency.
The City of Evansville selected NetApp® V3240 open storage controllers for its primary data center, replicating to FAS3210 storage systems in its disaster recovery site. The V3240 solution was ideal for this cost-conscious and efficiency-minded department, since it allowed the department to keep the storage investments it had already made, but gave it access to NetApp’s (NASDAQ: NTAP) robust operating system to manage all of the storage seamlessly.
The IT team uses key components of the NetApp Integrated Data Protection portfolio, including Snapshot™ software, which creates instantaneous copies of even very large file systems, and SnapMirror® technology, NetApp’s flagship data replication solution, to reduce risk of downtime and accelerate recovery. In the past, the task of retrieving data from tape backups could occupy staff for weeks, but, with this solution, local backups can be recovered in minutes with decreased risk of data loss, since Snapshot copies are produced several times daily.
SnapMirror enables staff to provide rapid recovery in the event of an outage, helping safeguard Evansville’s data and prevent outages that could disrupt key services to residents. Because IT efficiency was essential to meeting strict budgetary requirements, the IT staff combined technologies from VMware and NetApp to increase disk utilization, reducing storage requirements by 60% at both primary and disaster recovery facilities.
All mission-critical applications, such as Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft SharePoint Server, are virtualized on NetApp storage. The staff can provision virtual servers in its production, Web, and disaster recovery server farms in significantly less time on NetApp storage. In the five years since launching its virtualization project, the organization has reduced its 150 physical servers to 15 servers, lowering operating costs, reducing the physical footprint, and lowering overall time spent on IT management.
The new NetApp storage environment allows the Computer Services division to accommodate the growing data requirements of many busy city and county departments. For example, the Evansville Water and Sewer utility can more readily meet compliance mandates by providing long-term archival of sewer-line videos. It also provides the needed storage for areas of significant growth such as the Assessor’s Office GIS spectrometry images and the enterprise content management systems that support Administrative Services. And all of this was accomplished without losing the existing investment in storage solutions from other vendors and without the time and cost of a complete storage infrastructure overhaul.
With an agile, consolidated, highly efficient storage environment, the City of Evansville is now going further, faster, maximizing its storage investment and creating a more visionary enterprise.
Supporting Quotes
  • John Staples, Site Manager, Mark Rolley Consulting, Inc., for the City of Evansville
    “We’ve freed up resources across the organization previously tasked with the day-to-day management and maintenance of a disparate IT infrastructure and standalone systems. By doing so, our staff can function more as business leaders, and we can all provide better services to our citizens, which is ultimately what we’re here to do.”
    “In the past decade I’ve witnessed steady data growth and eventually an inability to scale the infrastructure to deliver all of the services requested by the departments we serve. NetApp scalability is a game changer. Today we don’t have to tell our clients, ‘No.’”
  • Regina Kunkle, Vice President of State and Local Government and Higher Education (SLED), NetApp “Local government agencies in today’s IT environment are met with constant challenges, particularly being called on to do more with less.
    NetApp’s storage solutions are the first step in creating a network ecosystem where efficiency, performance, scalability, and cost effectiveness are central demands. We are dedicated to providing the City of Evansville with the best platforms and solutions to fit its needs today and for generations to come.”
Additional Resources
About NetApp 
NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that deliver outstanding cost efficiency and accelerate business breakthroughs. Discover our passion for helping companies around the world go further, faster at www.netapp.com.
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