Maricopa County Recorder’s Office Modernizes Data Center

Arizona’s Maricopa County, the fourth most populous
county in the US and home to Phoenix, is cost efficiently delivering services
and instant information to its citizens, thanks in part to its upgraded data
center based on Dell, Inc. infrastructure
technologies.

By migrating to Dell storage and servers from EMC, the county’s Recorder’s
Office has been able to speed up implementation of multiple programs that
empower citizens while also saving more than half a million dollars for tax
payers.

The Maricopa County Recorder’s Office has a proven track record of delivering
solutions to better serve its constituents. To further boost productivity and
provide new capabilities to the community, the country’s IT team wanted to
simplify data management, store and serve data faster, and optimize IT
resources while maximizing availability of the data center. The office migrated
to Dell Compellent arrays powered by Dell PowerEdge servers to quickly
achieving service level goals.

As an example of the power of the new infrastructure, the Maricopa County
Recorder’s Office has leveraged its new infrastructure to enable citizens to
search more than 150 million documents dating back to 1975. The OCR technology used for the searches runs 40% faster on Dell
technology, providing citizens with faster access to the content they want.

On a daily basis, the site receives more than three million hits and 60,000
documents are purchased. The county was also able to more quickly execute
redistricting efforts because Dell’s solutions cut processing time by 75%.
Further, to help ensure voter confidence, the Recorer’s Office leverages the
Dell Compellent array to store real-time GPS data on all voting equipment used
across its 724 precincts. The county was the first in the state to implement
this type of GPS-enabled tracking system.

The migration to Compellent required no downtime due to the modular nature
of array and the IT team can add more drives and new controllers without
ripping out and replacing storage systems as it had to in the past. The storage arrays also include perpetual software licensing, so the
county pays only once for software and does not have to re-license software in
an upgrade. As a result, the Recorder’s Office estimates its migration to
Dell’s systems saved $290,000 in projected upgrade cost avoidance from
licensing savings, $135,000 in drive space saved through thin provisioning and
$90,000 worth of additional drive space reclaimed due to automated storage
tiering.

"I can provision storage for a
server in 30% less time with Dell Compellent," says Rich Adams, IT
operations manager at the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office. "Overall, I spend about 30% less time on
storage administration, giving me more time for other, more valuable projects."

Additionally, recording each of the 10,000 daily documents processed by the
Recorder’s Office has traditionally been a time-consuming process simply
because of the geographical size of the county. Giving its constituents more
convenient access and enabling recordings in a matter of mn, the office’s IT
team established remote kiosks in local libraries that include a document
scanner, webcam, credit card reader and network connection to the Recorder’s
Office. The county estimates that more than 200,000 driving miles have been
saved to date because constituents no longer have to travel to the office to
file documents in person.

"When we’ve proposed ideas like the
kiosk, which won a National Association of Counties best-in-category award for
innovation, Dell has always been there," says Terry Thompson, IT
director, Maricopa County Recorder’s Office. "Dell helped us with the kiosk design, manufacturing and implementation
resources. EMC wouldn’t support the storage tiering we required
unless an administrator spent time moving data around."

"More and more organizations are
replacing traditional storage equipment and modernizing their data centers to
manage growing amounts of data more efficiently in more flexible and
cost-effective ways," said Travis Vigil, executive director of product
management, Dell storage. "The
Maricopa County Recorder’s Office is a standout example of leveraging Dell
technology to achieve significant cost savings that enable them to deliver
public services easier, faster and with the ability to simply scale as needed."