Cranberry Township, Pa., went live with an IP SAN, enabling the township to improve the availability of its IT services and information, while providing an affordable, scalable foundation platform to accommodate future IT growth.
"We have a lot of redundant systems and high availability systems where we're using clustering, failover and load balancing. The only reason they're close together is the storage has to be readily accessible," said Zygmunt. "The iSCSI SAN gave us a way to geographically disperse storage and systems and maintain the high availability while getting the additional level of business continuity."
However, Cranberry Township faced two major roadblocks in achieving their ambitious storage consolidation goals: a limited budget, typical of most municipalities, and modest requirements of a small enterprise that was below the radar of many mainstream storage vendors.
Cranberry Township now has a high-availability scalable IT infrastructure operating across two data centers. "The failover occurs between sites so if you were to come over to my building and drop a grenade in my data center, the nodes on the other side would essentially begin running the services," said Zygmunt. "I'm very excited because it's really worked out extremely well for us. We just went live with the majority of the services and it couldn't be more beautiful. I'm certainly pleased with [the system]."
