Rockingham County Government Selects Dot Hill

The Information Technology Services Department for Rockingham County, N.C. turned to Dot Hill Systems Corp.‘s commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) storage systems that scale to handle the county’s growing storage, and help improve technology efficiencies and reduce costs.

Like many local government agencies, Rockingham County found itself struggling to keep up with growing data amounts while continuing to serve its constituents in the wake of budget shortfalls. Data storage needs were doubling yearly, and two key IT initiatives – server virtualization and consolidation of computing resources across various departments – were driving the need for data storage standardization and modernization.

Rockingham County selected the Dot Hill AssuredSAN 3920 array to provide a storage foundation for future growth. The system’s 8Gb Fibre Channel interface manages the workload from Rockingham’s VMware virtual server environment. The additional 1Gb iSCSI host interface within the same unit enables Rockingham to leverage iSCSI networks to facilitate sharing of storage resources between departments.

Outfitted with twenty four 300GB SAS drives and a 3120 JBOD, Rockingham County’s AssuredSAN 3920 delivers 19.2TB total raw capacity.

Rockingham County is now able to rely on an expandable SAN solution with dual controllers that eliminate the risk of a single point of failure – critical to maintain the integrity and availability of the county’s information.

Additionally, the county has now gained data protection capabilities. Via the Dot Hill AssuredSAN storage solution with snapshot functionality, automatic snapshots are scheduled at various points in the day, resulting in improved RTO and RPO.

The new system also enables several older storage systems to be consolidated into a single storage area network, and with the addition of VMware virtualization software, Rockingham is now able to centrally manage its computing, storage and network environments while increasing server utilization, performance and system uptime, and reducing the cost and complexity of delivering enterprise-class services. The Dot Hill AssuredSAN solution meets the needs of Rockingham’s virtual environments, with capabilities that support high availability, overall system scalability and overall system responsiveness to drive faster application throughput.

"We had a limited budget and several criteria to meet, which included a single storage system capable of expanding and scaling beyond 100TB, and the ability to be compatible within a Microsoft environment, yet able to operate across non-Microsoft settings now and in the future," said David Whicker, director of Information Technology Services, Rockingham County Government. "I knew that with a limited budget the potential of purchasing a SAN at a reasonable cost could be challenging. However, Dot Hill’s arrays met these expectations while also offering inexpensive expansion options. The Dot Hill AssuredSAN solution is delivering as promised, and we can now experience faster data response, reliability and security advancements."

"Government agencies seek easy-to-use, cost-effective storage solutions to assist with managing, migrating, consolidating and virtualizing the massive amounts of electronic information they must maintain," said Inese Lanka, director of government sales, Dot Hill Systems. "We were very pleased to work with the Rockingham County Government on their consolidation and virtualization project, and just as thrilled when they needed more capacity and a remote replication solution. Recently, we were able to begin planning for site to site backups using our AssuredSAN DR Solution with integrated AssuredRemote remote replication software."

"Dot Hill is well positioned to capitalize on IT investment priorities that are critical to state and local governments, including storage virtualization and data protection," stated Mark Peters, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "Dot Hill has been a trusted partner serving the government market for more than 20 years, always focusing on innovative storage solutions that can meet the specialized and complex demands of those government IT environments."

Dot Hill offers a number of patented, energy-saving features that help Rockingham County address the federal government’s emphasis on reducing data center energy costs by 10 percent this year. Featuring eco-friendly enhancements such as energy-saving drive-spin-down and Dot Hill’s patented EcoStor battery-free alternative for cache memory, the AssuredSAN line offers easy installation, configuration and management without the need to rely on technical support. This ease-of-use translates to faster implementation and helps mitigate training costs.