The City of Mission Viejo Enlists Govplace to Implements DR Plan

The city of Mission Viejo recently implemented a new disaster recovery plan using cutting-edge technology to reduce costs, without sacrificing performance and efficiency.

Public safety and disaster preparedness being primary goals for the city, and wanting to continue to provide the most consistent and proficient service to city residents and customers, Mission Viejo city officials decided to employ a new state-of-the-art disaster recovery plan.

Reducing energy consumption and cost, without sacrificing performance and effectiveness, were priorities for Mission Viejo officials. Additionally, in order to optimize their infrastructure, they wanted to consolidate two data centers, which were managed at the same location, and create an environment capable of providing IT staff with the flexibility to accommodate their swiftly growing and changing services.

With the need for an innovative cost efficient solution, the city worked with Govplace for the creation and execution of an improved disaster recovery plan. Govplace, headquartered in Irvine, Calif., has extensive experience with similar challenges at other public sector organizations. Due to their exclusive public sector focus, Govplace was an ideal choice to be able to assess and develop a solution based on the City’s unique needs.

The ultimate solution included consolidating physical servers, upgrading the storage area network (SAN) and establishing a main VMware ESX server farm. Utilizing a combination of virtualization, disk-to-disk backup with de-duplication, and replication technologies, the city of Mission Viejo virtualized 80% of their servers, and now boasts 50% reduction in its data center footprint. The fully replicated environment at the disaster recovery site outside of Orange County will allow the city to continue providing necessary services to citizens and ensure critical taxpayer needs are met in the event of a disaster or emergency.

"Govplace was a great partner, who came up with the right innovative solution for Mission Viejo’s unique needs," said Jackie Alexander, Director of Information Technology for the city of Mission Viejo, "Their exclusive focus on the public sector was a definite asset to understanding our needs and in designing a solution that best suits us."