"By implementing this innovative IBM solution, we will be able to increase the performance, flexibility, and availability of our systems," said Elizabeth Mounts, the city of Richmond's Director of Information Technology. "This breakthrough technology will allow us to shift our storage needs on demand, enable infrastructure standardization and vendor independence, and reduce the impact of future migrations. It also will provide a single point of storage control and will significantly reduce our total disk storage expense across our heterogeneous storage offerings."
The city of Richmond developed a strategy to deliver information and services to an array of user communities ranging from the casual browser of government services to remote employees, and business owners requiring secure, reliable access to application and data services. IBM's information on demand strategy, and specifically its storage virtualization technologies, addressed all of the city's stated requirements: support for diverse storage arrays, utilizing open standards technology, and the ability to have highly secure technology.
IBM Business Partner Mainline Information Systems spearheaded the project for the city of Richmond and recently began implementation of IBM TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller into the storage infrastructure. This SAN solution is designed to manage and support more than eight terabytes of data covering traffic conditions, police reports, job searches, and utility information. The new infrastructure is also supporting more than 85 different applications that government employees use to help run the day-to-day operations of the city such as e-mail support, revenue forecasts, and human services systems.
The main data center was comprised of more than 120 different servers from IBM, HP, Dell and Sun, each with its own direct attached storage solution from multiple vendors. Through a cost analysis completed jointly by Mainline Information Systems and the city of Richmond, the city determined it was underutilizing its storage technology resources. The city of Richmond believes that when fully implemented across its IBM TotalStorage DS4000 and EMC CX300 and CX400 storage infrastructure, the IBM TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller can help the city of Richmond utilize more than 85 percent of its storage infrastructure, an increase from 40 percent storage utilization.
