Datalink Upgrades Storage and DR Infrastructure at City of Riverside in California

Datalink Corp., announced the completion of a storage and DR infrastructure upgrade project for the City of Riverside, CA.

Datalink replaced a five-year-old SAN with new technology that nearly doubled its storage capacity and provides failover capabilities between primary and secondary data centers, ensuring a steady flow of information to the city’s 2,300 employees and 312,000 residents. System design, deployment and data migration services were supplied by its personnel.

The City of Riverside selected Datalink in a competitive bidding process that included six vendors. The depth and breadth of Datalink’s technical staff was a key factor in the contract award, along with high analyst rankings for the NetApp, Inc.‘s solution that Datalink recommended.

“Our objective was to be sure we had a reliable solution as well as a strong implementation partner that would take the lead and see the project through to completion,” said Lea Deesing, chief innovation officer, City of Riverside. “The fact that Datalink was able to complete the migration on time, on budget, and quietly in the background without any unplanned downtime is a real accomplishment for a wholesale overhaul of a major backend system.”

The project involved migrating half a petabyte of data from the city’s outgoing system and deploying a NetApp FAS8040 storage array at the city’s primary data center, a FAS8020 at another location for DR, NetApp SnapMirror replication software to maintain a duplicate copy of the city’s data at the DR site, and NetApp’s Clustered Data OnTAP OS enabling failover between the two sites as well as scalability.

The upgrade provides nearly a petabyte of storage that can be either scaled up or scaled out, including the ability to move workloads to any storage pool owned by any node within the cluster to accommodate changing needs or hardware refreshes without disrupting data access for end users.

The deployment was completed after business hours to avoid service interruptions. The Datalink team guiding the work included a project manager, design and implementation engineers, and advanced services personnel who handled the data migration. The company is also providing technical support through its OneCall service, which is staffed by two US-based support centers to ensure redundancy and compliance with SLAs.

“Any mission-critical project like this requires an experienced integration partner to ensure a smooth implementation. This is particularly true when a project involves newer technologies like NetApp Clustered Data OnTAP, which requires an advanced understanding of migration methodologies as well as storage, virtualization and network architectures,” said Shawn O’Grady, COO, Datalink. “The success of this deployment demonstrates the importance of having a knowledgeable services team to design, install and support new data center infrastructure.“