County of San Mateo Chooses Commvault

Commvault Systems, Inc. announced that the County of San Mateo is using its Data Platform to manage data on the County’s hybrid cloud, which consists of both an on-premises private cloud and public clouds.

The Data Platform enables the County of San Mateo to protect, move and activate this data, helping it launch remarkable open data and other smart city projects that use data to improve county residents’ quality of life.

Located in the heart of Silicon Valley, between San Jose and San Francisco, CA, the County of San Mateo consists of 22 cities with a population totaling more than 760,000 people. Several of the world’s technology companies, including Facebook, Oracle Corporation, and Electronic Arts are headquartered in the County. The County employs 7,600 people, and its total budget for 2016 was $1.3 billion.

Supporting Innovative Digital Transformation Initiatives
The County is using Commvault to protect, manage and activate the data used for its Open San Mateo County digital transformation initiative.

This initiative enables County residents to: 

• View the County’s Shared Vision 2025 dashboard, providing them with up-to-date data on the County’s progress in realizing various community outcomes and goals, with statistics on crime, homelessness, greenhouse gas emissions, resident life expectancy, students’ reading proficiency and student graduation rates
• Determine how the County is spending taxpayer funds with the San Mateo County Open Checkbook, which provides details on spending by department, by expenditure type and by payee.
• Access interactive maps and other geographic information via the County’s Geographic Information System (GIS), including county property records and interactive property maps that can help accelerate real estate sales and construction projects, and maps showing the status of beach and creek conditions, allowing residents to learn which local creek and beaches are safe for swimming.
• Connect with the services they need to access food through the Get Connected SMC project, in which visitors to the site can find out if they are likely to qualify for four food assistance programs, and secure information about services and organizations that provide immediate access to food, like food banks.
• Track the performance of County services, with a department performance dashboard that allows visitors to click on the name of a department or program to explore what services are provided and key service performance data.
• Assess and address flood threats to their homes and businesses, with an interactive map that provides data on sandbag distribution locations, as well data on how sea level rise might affect the County over the coming years.
• View and pay property tax bills, as well as see previous years’ property tax data and visualize the tax information on over 250,000 parcels in the County.

The County has also collaborated with non-governmental organizations and other third parties to activate open data in ways that benefit residents. For example, Sustainable San Mateo County is using open data from the County to help San Mateo County residents understand more about how they can participate in hyperlocal agriculture by keeping bees, chickens and other animals, and growing gardens on their residential property with its 3B’s project, which stands for Birds, Bees, and Beans.

The County has also used the Data Platform to support its other digital transformation initiatives, including its SMC Public WiFi program. This program is designed to provide Internet access to unserved and underserved communities, while also supporting educational opportunities for students, spurring local economic development, and providing greater access to County services to all residents.

“Commvault has helped us embark on several smart city projects leveraging the power of the County’s data to drive our digital transformation initiatives forward,” said Jon Walton, CIO, County of San Mateo. “By providing us with a powerful data management platform that delivers rock-solid data protection, reduces time and money spent on storage infrastructure and administration, and enables us to rapidly develop and deploy new open data and other smart city applications, Commvault is helping the County of San Mateo achieve some truly remarkable results.“

Optimizing the Hybrid Cloud with Commvault
The County of San Mateo uses the Data Platform to manage data on its hybrid-cloud, which includes an on-premises private cloud, as well as public cloud series. By using the platform to support backup, recovery and snapshot management tiering on both these clouds, as well as movement of data between these clouds, the County of San Mateo can:

• Recover data whether there is a minor data corruption or major disaster.
• Transfer data between its private cloud and public cloud, lowering storage costs while increasing agility for development and testing of its smart city and other projects.
• Secure the data management flexibility needed to switly address new business, user or OpenSan Mateo County project requirements.
• Comply with new data privacy, security or other federal and state regulations.

The County of San Mateo’s private cloud is located in two data centers, runs a virtualized environment on 74 Nutanix, Inc.’s nodes, and is used primarily for mission-critical and other production applications, including the Open San Mateo County and WiFi project related applications, as well as short-term backup. The County’s public cloud includes cloud services from AWS and Microsoft Azure and is used primarily for test, development and long-term backup and archiving.

“The County of San Mateo demonstrates how government agencies can take advantage of the cost and flexibility benefits of,e hybrid cloud to use their data for strategic initiatives that create stakeholder value, without compromising on DR or regulatory compliance capabilities,” said Rick Baumgart, VP, state and local government and education, Commvault. “With the Commvault Data Platform, the County can backup, recover and archive their data, know everything about it, move it wherever they want, and orchestrate and automate tasks related to protecting and managing it. As their Open San Mateo County and other digital transformation initiatives demonstrate, Commvault can help government agencies to not only protect their data, but also launch remarkable smart city projects that improve the quality of life in their communities.“

Learn About Achieving the Remarkable at Commvault GO 2017
Jon Walton, the CIO of the County of San Mateo, will be a keynote speaker at Commvault’s second annual customer conference, Commvault GO 2017, to be held November 6-8, 2017 in Washington D.C. He will join Gartner Group research director Robert Rhame, Paul Petty, head of IT infrastructure for Laing O’Rourke, and Mark Trenerry, cloud and infrastructure manager for Queensland Investment Corporation, for a discussion on how enterprises are achieving remarkable things with data.

Commvault GO 2017 will be an event for businesses seeking to use their data to find a path to the remarkable, with an agenda that includes more than 95 breakout, 30 mini theater and 25 structured lab speaking sessions, as well as industry-specific and other expert-led learning sessions.

The conference offers businesses an opportunity to explore how they can protect, manage and activate data to unlock business opportunities and address some of most pressing data challenges, with presentations by industry thought customers, and partners, including executives from Commvault, Google, Microsoft and Cisco.

Commvault GO 2017’s keynote sessions, emceed by Kenneth Cukier, senior editor of digital products at The Economist, will include presentations from Commvault chairman, president and CEO, N. Robert Hammer; Commvault COO Al Bunte; Capt. ‘Sully’ Sullenberger; and explorer Robert Swan OBE (Officer of the British Empire). In addition, Gartner Group research director Robert Rhame will moderate a discussion with Jon Walton, CIO of the County of San Mateo; Paul Petty, head of IT infrastructure for Laing O’Rourke; and Mark Trenerry, cloud & infrastructure manager for Queensland Investment Corporation, on how their enterprises are achieving remarkable things with data.

Commvault GO 2017 will also feature presentations and exhibits from members of Commvault’s broad partner ecosystem, including Diamond and Ruby sponsors CDW, Cisco, Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft, Arrow, Nutanix, SHI, Quantum, Tech Data and Infinidat.