City of Denton

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City boosts system performance, gains business continuity. ESSENTIALS ... and SQL Server databases. ... We don't have to
CITY OF DENTON, TEXAS City boosts system performance, gains business continuity OVERVIEW The City of Denton, Texas encompasses nearly 95 square miles and has a population of more than 113,000 residents. Denton is one of the fastest-growing communities and eleventh largest city of the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) Metroplex.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE Denton’s prior NetApp, IBM, and Compellent storage environment was not providing adequate capacity and performance as its IT infrastructure expanded to support a

ESSENTIALS Industry

growing population. In addition, system administration was becoming more complex. For data protection, Denton depended exclusively on tape for data backup,

Government

estimating that a data center recovery would take days or weeks. With the

Organization Size

Denton/Fort Worth area frequently subject to severe weather, including tornados

1,500 employees

and flooding, potential outages threatened disruption of vital government services

Business Challenge

and revenue streams generated by city-owned utilities.

• • •

Expanding IT infrastructure to

SOLUTION

support growing population

Recognizing the need for change, Denton’s IT staff decided to replace its antiquated

Inadequate capacity and system

environment with EMC® VNX® unified storage, Vblock® Infrastructure Platform from

performance

VCE, and EMC VPLEX™ virtual storage to reduce operational costs, improve

Limited disaster recovery

performance, and enable business continuity.

Solutions

The cornerstone of the city’s primary data center is EMC VNX unified storage implemented with a FLASH 1st strategy to maximize performance and storage



EMC VNX unified storage



EMC FAST Suite



VCE Vblock

FAST Cache. The FAST Suite automatically moves data across Flash, SAS, or



EMC VPLEX Metro

nearline SAS drives to match performance requirements while maximizing storage



VMware vSphere

utilization.



Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, JD Edwards ERP, Harris Northstar

Results •

Improved storage performance by 230 percent

• •

Decreased IT administration time Provided instantaneous failover for Tier 1 applications



Maximized resource utilization across data centers

CUSTOMER PROFILE

efficiency. The FLASH 1st strategy includes VNX, Flash drives, and the EMC FAST Suite—consisting of FAST VP (Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools) and

To further save costs and maximize efficiency, Denton has virtualized 90 percent of its server infrastructure with VMware® vSphere™. Kevin Gunn, Director of Technology Services, City of Denton, says, “What set VNX apart from other vendors’ solutions was FAST Cache. We use cache memory and Flash drives to boost our I/O performance. And we only need a few drives because a little Flash goes a long way.” In addition, Denton implemented a Vblock Infrastructure Platform—which integrates Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) blade servers, Cisco networking, EMC VNX storage, and VMware vSphere virtualization—in its new disaster recovery facility. For streamlined management, Denton uses VMware vCenter™ Operations Management Suite and EMC Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM).

EMC VPLEX Metro virtual storage is also installed in Denton’s primary and remote data centers, enabling active sharing of resources across both locations and comprehensive data protection. During phase two of the project, Denton will implement EMC MirrorView™ for data mirroring for Tier 2 applications. “We invested a lot to build a disaster recovery center so being able to leverage both sites as active data centers with VPLEX was very appealing,” explains Gunn. “The other vendors couldn’t provide seamless data mobility like EMC.” Additionally, the EMC and Vblock infrastructure supports Denton’s critical services and applications, such as “smart” electric meter reading, computer-aided emergency dispatch, JD Edwards ERP, Harris Northstar billing environment, Microsoft Exchange, and SQL Server databases.

PERFORMANCE BOOST MEETS HIGH DEMAND Not only does Denton’s IT infrastructure provide file and network resources to 1,500 employees, but it supports high-volume applications such as billing for 45,000 utility customers and web servers with 250,000 unique visitors monthly. With such heavy usage, the VNX-driven performance improvements were noticed immediately. “Our NetApp array maxed out at 3,000 IOPS, which resulted in our virtual servers performing poorly,” Gunn recalls. “Since firing up the VNX and FAST Suite, we now easily handle 10,000 IOPS—a performance increase of over 230 percent.”

“Our NetApp array maxed out at 3,000 IOPS, which resulted in our virtual servers performing poorly. Since firing up the VNX and FAST Suite, we now easily handle 10,000 IOPS—a performance increase of over 230 percent.” Kevin Gunn Director of Technology Services at City of Denton, Texas

DECREASED CAPEX AND OPEX As a government entity, Denton is mindful to ensure taxpayer dollars are spent on IT solutions that increase efficiency and deliver high-quality, reliable services to city employees and citizens. With VNX, Denton is seeing savings across the board. Gunn notes, “We like the flexibility of having iSCSI, Fibre Channel, and NAS (networkattached storage) all in the VNX. With NetApp, we needed to buy additional hardware, licensing, and maintenance when we wanted to add Fibre Channel.” He continues, “With only 25 IT professionals supporting 1,500 employees and 113,000 residents, our time is very valuable. We don’t have to monitor performance nearly as much now that we have the FAST Suite, which automatically ensures the data is tiered according to its activity level. “The EMC VNX plug-in to VMware vCenter makes administration of virtualized infrastructures much easier compared to other solutions we’ve used. We also spend less time configuring and managing multiple virtual pools. We’ve reduced our weekly administration time by 20 percent—from ten hours to eight hours per week. This reduction enables us to focus more on keeping our systems running smoothly.”

COMBINING BUSINESS CONTINUITY AND EFFICIENCY Not only did Denton want to dramatically improve disaster recovery, but it wanted to reduce complexity and minimize cost. The city found the perfect combination with VPLEX, Vblock, and VNX solutions. VPLEX was used for the initial replication of all data to the remote data center and did so with zero downtime. Denton also depends on VMware Fault Tolerance for instantaneous failover. “Our remote data center is built to withstand tornado winds of up to 165 miles per hour, but it has limited floor space,” Gunn explains. “By serving as a data center in a box, the Vblock solution fit the bill. We also got the Vblock platform running in two days instead of the six to eight weeks we’d need to separately install the servers, storage, and networking. We accelerated our business continuity plan while gaining more time to work on improving the quality and efficiency of the government services we support.” “If the billing system for our city-owned utilities suffers an outage, we’d lose about $180,000 daily in revenue,” continues Gunn. “It was clear to our elected officials that preventing a financial loss of such magnitude made EMC VPLEX well worth the investment.” VPLEX also has significantly increased the value of Denton’s business continuity resources. Gunn notes, “With VPLEX, we’re able to fully leverage resources in both data centers without expensive equipment sitting idle in a dark disaster recovery facility. We’ve taken out the complexity and achieved seamless, efficient business continuity. It’s been a dramatic and positive transformation.”

CONTACT US To learn more about how EMC products, services, and solutions can help solve your business and IT challenges, contact your local representative or authorized reseller—or visit us at www.EMC.com.

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EMC believes the information in this document is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice.