City of Davenport Acquired Pure Storage FlashBlade

The city of Davenport, IA, chose to partner with Pure Storage, Inc. in 2012 to implement a more efficient infrastructure for its VDI project and has continued to expand its environment due to the relationship with Pure.

The city most recently deployed Pure FlashBlade, an advanced file and object storage architected to consolidate complex data silos, which cut the time to download hours of footage from law enforcement officer body and dashboard cameras from 20 minutes to less than two minutes on average. This performance improvement allows the city to optimize use of police cars and resources, while improving public safety by ensuring footage is downloaded and uploaded in a timely manner.

The Davenport police department serves a population of just over 100,000. To maintain the safety and security of the community, resources like police cars need to be available at all times. The department has approximately 15 minutes to turn over cars between shifts and any delay getting cars back into circulation compromises public safety. The turnover process includes downloading six-to-eight hours of HD video footage (averaging 577MB of data) captured while on duty. It is essential that the city can download this valuable, yet voluminous, data rapidly to get the police vehicles back into circulation.

Davenport previously deployed an in-car system – but was unable to automatically offload the footage due to storage and Wifi limitations. When the city purchased a new on-officer camera solution from Axon and deployed FlashBlade, it was clear the Pure environment could support automatic off-load and this implementation was followed up with a matching in-car camera system.

With the parallelism of FlashBlade, the city can download video in an average of 2 minutes – allowing police cars to return to duty rapidly. City employees can then upload the data from the Pure storage environment to the cloud in approximately 4 minutes on average.

“We have a robust system in place where the dashboard-camera footage begins downloading rapidly to our Pure Storage FlashBlade environment as soon as a police car enters the bay – completing the process in just minutes. It has been a game changer for our operations,” said Cory Smith, CIO, City of Davenport.

The city also experienced latency when downloading footage from police body cameras. While their availability is not keeping resources out of circulation because the cameras are individually assigned – unlike the police cars – the ability to quickly download and store video footage is essential to keeping the city’s emergency services running smoothly. After each shift, the body cameras have four-to-six hours of footage each, which the city can now download in minutes and later move to the cloud.

“With Pure, we trust that our IT infrastructure is not going to keep police cars out of circulation and compromise the safety of our community,” said Smith.

Davenport Sees Additional Success with VDI Deployment
The city first began utilizing Pure when it wanted to transition to the more flexible and efficient IT infrastructure afforded by virtual desktops (VDI). The city decided to test VMware View and FlashArray concurrently. It first deployed a pilot of VDI users, starting with 150 desktops and reduced latency from 20ms to less than 1ms. The city has since increased VDI deployment and is now over 90% virtualized.