City of Evansville, IN, Delivers More Services

The City of Evansville‘s 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 DR 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 centralize its entire storage
environment to improve IT management and efficiency.

The City of Evansville selected NetApp, Inc.‘s V3240 open storage controllers
for its primary data center, replicating to FAS3210 storage systems in its DR
site.

The V3240 solution gave it access to NetApp’s  OS
to manage all of the storage.

The IT team uses key components of the
NetApp Integrated Data Protection portfolio, including Snapshot software, which
creates copies of large file systems, and SnapMirror
technology, 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 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 budgetary requirements, the IT staff
combined technologies from VMware and NetApp to increase disk utilization,
reducing storage requirements by 60% at both primary and DR facilities.

All applications, such as Exchange Server
and SharePoint Server, are virtualized on NetApp storage. The staff can
provision virtual servers in its production, Web, and DR server farms in less
time on NetApp storage. In the five years since launching its virtualization
project, the organization has reduced its 150 physical servers to 10 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 meet compliance mandates by providing long-term
archival of sewer-line videos. It also provides the needed storage for areas of
growth such as the Assessor’s Office GIS spectrometry images and the enterprise
content management systems that support Administrative Services.

John Staples, site manager, Mark Rolley
Consulting, Inc., for the City of Evansville, said: "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, VP of State and Local
Government and Higher Education (SLED), NetApp, said: "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."