Kane County provides comprehensive government services -- from general administration, public health and education to law enforcement, judicial system and tax collection -- for the fourth largest county in Illinois and the 17th fastest growing county in the nation with over 480,000 residents and 1,452 employees.
Kane County's Technology Department has completely overhauled the county's IT environment in the last four years by using progressive technology to turn around aging equipment while addressing its constrained budget cycle, limited data space and significant staffing cost concerns. Needing an easy-to-use, cost-effective way to support its services, Kane County took a creative approach with the implementation of a virtual desktop infrastructure.
"In overhauling our technology department, Kane County needed a storage solution that would seamlessly integrate with VMware ESX Server to give us hardware consolidation and better resource management across our virtual enterprise," said David Siles, chief technology officer for Kane County. "Our vision was to 'do more with less' by using self-managing technology that would take the pressure off of our IT staff and our limited budget. The EqualLogic iSCSI SAN allowed us to do that by eliminating hours from our storage management processes with its built in intelligence and automation - while providing a consolidated storage platform with all the enterprise features we need at a fraction of the cost of a Fibre Channel SAN."
Kane County chose VMware ESX Server, which is part of the new VMware Infrastructure 3 product suite, with native iSCSI support along with EqualLogic's iSCSI-based SAN to minimize cost and management complexity and maximize administration flexibility in their consolidated server environment. The implementation of EqualLogic's storage solution into Kane County's virtual environment has enabled it to consolidate 56 Intel servers running Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows 2003, SQL Server, Terminal Services and Exchange onto four IBM xSeries systems - all of which are connected to three EqualLogic PS300E arrays. With the virtual storage and server solutions in place, Kane County has exceeded its business goals by eliminating hardware purchasing requirements in excess of $120,000 in the first year of implementation; reducing space, power and HVAC requirements by over 50 percent; and cutting annual downtime to only an hour and nine minutes.
