Madison County Circuit Clerk’s Office Got NETArchive From Alliance Storage Technologies

Alliance Storage Technologies, Inc. announces a customer win at Madison County Circuit Clerk’s Office in Madison County, IL, responsible for filing, recording and certifying state and local court cases and related court documents. Multiple alliance professional archiving systems are installed to meet their requirements to protect, secure and ensure immediate and continued access to court data.

With a new State of Illinois mandate requiring that civil court records are electronically stored and available for real-time access, the Circuit Clerk’s Office was concerned that the potential for added workload might overwhelm their existing data archiving infrastructure. It was imperative that sub-second access is provided to court records while ensuring that their IBM iSeries server is not overwhelmed and that access to archive data be distributed to the archive storage tier. The Circuit Clerk’s Office had to simultaneously ensure that if a DR event should occur that they could be backup and running in minutes.

The solution consists of a NETArchive S10 NAS which is the primary active archive, with an integrated server, large RAID capacity, I/O backplane to support the increased workloads and Sony Corp.‘s optical disk archive technology providing scalable optical capacities of up to 1.6PB with optical drive I/O performance. 

The Circuit Clerk’s existing UDO Archive Appliance, in service for 10 years, will act as the passive HA system in the replication pair. With all original data being synchronized (replicated) between the two systems, they are ready for immediate failover should it be required. This integrates with the JANO Justice Case Management System running on their IBM iSeries Server.

“Access times have been greatly improved,” said Brian Davis, manager application support, The Madison County Circuit Court Office. “Where data access previously required direct media access, taking 20s on average, it is now virtually instantaneous. By utilizing the NETArchive’s RAID storage tier to cache our archived court records, we have ensured that we can meet Illinois State mandates requiring online access to digitized records in an exceptionally timely manner. Importantly, we have also ensured no additional impact to the iSeries System performance by distributing I/O workload to the NETArchive system.“

To maximize ROI, the existing UDO Archive Appliance was implemented as the passive system in the HA replication pair. The Madison County Circuit Courts Office is prepared to respond to any disaster event including cyber-attacks such as ransomware. 

“Installation of the NETArchive with continued usage of the UDO Archive Appliance has allowed us to make the most of our previous investments and fully meet the challenges and goals we identified,” said Davis.

“The NETArchive hybrid cloud data archiving solution offers compliant long-term data retention, an unmatched level of data durability and security, with a permanent WORM compliant copy of last resort backed by a 100-plus-year media warranty,” said Chris Carr, CEO, Alliance Storage Technologies. “Incorporating optional enterprise features for data archiving and data protection such as AES-256 data encryption with integrated key management, industry-standard access authentication, built-in backup and recovery options, and HA data replication, NETArchive meets the needs of the most demanding data archiving environments.“

Case study