ChallengeNash County Government had not

refreshed its IT infrastructure in

several years. Storage administration

was constrained by inflexible storage

systems, so IT staff could not respond

to changes in storage requirements

without extensive overtime.

SolutionThe county is implementing a proven

solution with server virtualization

using Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers and

Dell Compellent Storage Center

SANs, Brocade switches and the

Dell KACE Family of Systems

Management Appliances.

Benefits• 25% of IT staff reclaimed for

research and development to

make IT more proactive

• Projected 20%-30% reduction

in power and cooling costs

• Up to 60% reduction in

server footprint

Application areas• Disaster Recovery

• Financial Services

• Green Efficiency

• Networking

• Services

• Storage Solutions

• System Management

• Virtualization

Customer profile

Company Nash County

Government

Industry Government

Country United States

Employees 700 (Full &

Part-Time)

Web site co.nash.nc.us

“If a database becomes corrupted or a server loses power, users are back in business within a few minutes. Tax professionals and other employees have the tools they need to serve the public expeditiously.” Bruce T. Harper, CIO/Director, Management of Enterprise Technology Services, Nash County Government

Nash County Government data center refresh improves productivity of IT staff by 25 percent

2

As responsibilities for IT managers increased,

however, budgets did not. For the data

centers that host and manage such a wide

range of diverse services, growth has often

meant a proliferation of siloed platforms

without a unifying architecture. To set up a

new service, the IT department frequently

bought a new server with internal storage

and implemented a dedicated infrastructure

with multiple single points of failure and

little redundancy.

Bruce T. Harper was familiar with this

picture when he came to Nash County

Government (Nash County) as CIO/Director

of Management of Enterprise Technology

Services, about a year and a half ago. Less

than an hour from Raleigh, North Carolina,

Nash County lies in the state’s Eastern

Coastal Plain. The government is made up

of 20 departments governed by a Board of

Commissioners. Due to lack of funds, the IT

infrastructure that supported the operations

of county government had not been

refreshed in several years.

Harper had encountered a similar situation

in his previous employment for another

county government. Having assisted in

providing a more solid foundation and

getting his previous employer started down

the right road, he was prepared to bring

that knowledge to his new position and

assist Nash County in making some of

the necessary steps in getting on that

same road.

His first step was to call Davenport Group, a

Dell Premier Partner that had assisted him

in transforming IT at his prior employer. He

asked Davenport Group for help in gathering

requirements and designing a new solution

for Nash County.

Technology at work

Services

Dell™ Financial Services

Dell Support Services -Dell ProSupport™ Mission Critical with four hour onsite response

Dell Compellent™ Copilot Support

Solutions

Dell KACE™ K1000 System Management Appliance

Dell KACE K2000 System Deployment Appliance

Hardware

Brocade FastIron SX 800 core switches

Brocade FCX624S-HPOE and FCX648S-HPOE edge switches

Dell Compellent Storage Center SANs

Dell PowerEdge R710 servers

Software

Dell Compellent Data Instant Replay

Dell Compellent Data Progression

Dell Compellent Dynamic Capacity

Dell Compellent Remote Instant Replay

VMware® vSphere™ 5

“We can do all our maintenance during the day, and no one knows the difference, with Dell Compellent.” Bruce T. Harper, CIO/Director, Management of Enterprise Technology Services, Nash County Government

Over the past decade, local county governments have been digitizing

their services to internal customers and citizens. Departments such as

taxes, emergency services, police, utilities and finance each required a

unique set of technologies.

3

Proliferating servers and single points of failure

“We were running a lot of outdated

technology with servers that were out of

warranty or going out of warranty,” says

Harper. “Instead of looking at the enterprise as

a whole, we were replacing equipment piece

by piece. We were managing approximately

55 servers, running off one core switch

behind one firewall, and our storage was very

quickly running out of space.”

Servers with internal storage and a few HP

LeftHand SANs accounted for the storage

infrastructure. Storage management was

inflexible and task-intensive, even on the

SANs. Once the storage was set up, it was

difficult to change.

Having a couple of two-day outages allowed

upper management to see that changes were

needed. “We had a power outage one time,

and it corrupted one of the databases on our

tax system,” says Harper. “We were down for

two days because the vendor had to rebuild

the database. We tried our best to minimize

downtime, but due to circumstances that

were out of our control, the outages were

becoming more common, which was

causing frustration for our users.”

Returning to a trusted partnerFor disaster recovery, the county paid a

third-party vendor to come in every evening,

take images of all the servers and databases,

and store the images offsite. “The service

becomes costly and poses security concerns,”

says Harper. “With the loss of data and files,

recovery could become cumbersome simply

because the third-party vendor has to be

contacted and Nash County then is subject

to their timeline in getting the data and files

restored. That could potentially take days

to complete.”

Harper knew from the start that a complete

refresh of the data center was necessary.

Working with Davenport Group, he decided

to reduce server sprawl and improve

availability with server virtualization using

Dell PowerEdge R710 servers and VMware

vSphere. Again, from previous experience, he

chose the storage solution that had brought

success in the past and purchased two Dell

Compellent Storage Center SANs with Series

40 Controllers and eight Fibre Channel front-

end interconnects.

Harper also evaluated solutions from HP and

EMC, but since he was already familiar with

Dell Compellent, the decision was easy. “Dell

Compellent was above and beyond the other

storage solutions we evaluated,” he says. “I

don’t have to worry about a forklift upgrade.

If storage grows, all we have to do is get

another enclosure and put the appropriate

disks in, and the data will be spread

intelligently across the whole disk array.”

The completion of the project is awaiting the

building of a new data center which has been

placed in the capital improvement budget for

projects requested, in the upcoming fiscal

year—a slower approval process than the rest

of the project, which is on a five-year lease

from Dell Financial Services. “The Dell lease

made the project feasible,” says Harper. “If we

had to purchase all the equipment outright, it

would have been difficult for the County and

probably wouldn’t have happened.” The fact

that Dell provided all the products through

a single contact also saved considerable

administrative time.

Improving performance while reducing server footprint by 60%According to Harper, Nash County is looking

to reduce the physical server footprint by

up to 60 percent over the next year by

virtualizing servers with VMware vSphere and

Dell PowerEdge servers. The reduction of

physical servers and the design of a new hot-

aisle containment cooling system will reduce

power and cooling costs considerably.

Users will experience an improvement in

application performance with a new core

switch and peripheral switches from Brocade.

Increased bandwidth with 10-Gigabit Ethernet

(GbE) connections between the core switch

and the peripheral switches and 1GbE

connections from the switch to the desktop

will eliminate latency in key accounting

applications, which had caused up to

10-second delays in response time.

“The county had not established a true helpdesk environment prior to now. The service desk staff is also being trained by Dell on how to run a helpdesk operation, so we should be able to hit the ground running.” Bruce T. Harper, CIO/Director, Management of Enterprise Technology Services, Nash County Government

4

Dell Compellent Data Progression software

for automated tiered storage helps maintain

storage performance cost effectively. “With

Dell Compellent Data Progression, less

frequently-accessed data goes to tier

three, but the user doesn’t experience any

degradation of performance,” says Harper.

“The most active blocks are automatically

moved to tier one. So we will be saving

money by not having to buy as much 15K

SAS tier one disk, without slowing down

response times.”

Saying goodbye to downtimeIn addition to high latency, users dealt with

low availability, waiting up to two days for

their applications to come back online in

some cases. Those problems will be gone,

according to Harper. “We take point-in-time

snapshots of key applications every 15 to 30

minutes with Dell Compellent Data Instant

Replay,” he says. “If a database becomes

corrupted or a server loses power, we take

the most recent Replay of the data, and users

are back in business within a few minutes.

The dual-controller configuration of the Dell

Compellent Storage Center SAN ensures that

there will be no interruption in availability for

expansions, and the redundancy provided by

VMware at the server level helps to ensure

that tax professionals and other employees

have the tools they need when they need

them to serve the public expeditiously.”

20 minute recovery for 911 dispatch facilityA second Dell Compellent Storage Center

SAN at a remote site provides a disaster

recovery solution for Nash County in the

event of a hurricane such as Floyd in 1999,

which brought torrential rainfall to Eastern

North Carolina and caused nearly every river

basin in the area to exceed 500-year

flood levels.

Using Dell Compellent Remote Instant Replay,

currently the primary site sends Replays

to the disaster recovery (DR) site every 15

to 30 minutes. “We are working to allow a

replication to take place every five seconds,”

says Harper. “If a catastrophic event hits our

911 dispatch facility here, currently we could

recover at our DR site with very little loss of

data in 20 minutes,” says Harper. “Our goal in

the near future is to have the DR site up and

operational in 12 minutes or less. Using the

previous technology, this would have taken

days, if it could have been done at all. The

Dell DR solution eliminates the need for the

outside vendor, which in turn saves funding

that can be used elsewhere.”

Users aren’t the only ones who will notice the

difference when the Dell solution goes live.

The IT staff will also get a break. “Whether you

need to redo a LUN or expand a volume, it’s

a very simple process with Dell Compellent,”

says Harper. “With the LeftHand models we

used, you could not go back and rearrange

a 200 gigabyte volume into four 50 gigabyte

volumes. You had to reconfigure the entire

storage device, regardless of how many

servers were attached to it. That work is very

time-consuming, so it has to be scheduled

after hours, in overtime. We can do all our

maintenance during the day, and

no one knows the difference, with

Dell Compellent.”

Three out of seven Nash County IT staff

members are trained to work with Dell

Compellent. “I’m expecting that we will free

up 25 percent of their time,” says Harper.

“That’s time we can allocate to research and

development so we won’t have to operate in

such a reactive environment.”

Another way Dell Compellent gives storage

administrators more flexibility is with thin

provisioning using Dell Compellent Dynamic

Capacity. “I can provision storage according

to current usage—not projected growth—

because I can add more capacity whenever I

want,” says Harper. “That defers purchases of

high-priced disk.”

Hello, help desk The new data center infrastructure will

give the whole Nash County IT staff even

more opportunities to work efficiently

with the Dell KACE Family of Systems

Management Appliances. Dell KACE K1000

System Management Appliance provides

an automated service desk, while the Dell

KACE K2000 System Deployment Appliance

performs inventory assessments, network

OS installs and disk imaging. “The Dell

KACE Appliances will enable us to be more

productive with automated tools,” says

Harper. “The County had not established a

true helpdesk environment prior to now. All

senior-level staff members have been doing

their jobs plus level-one troubleshooting. The

service desk staff is also being trained by Dell

on how to run a helpdesk operation, so we

should be able to hit the ground running.”

For its own peace of mind, the county has

Dell ProSupport Mission Critical with four

hour onsite response on the Dell servers. “We

haven’t had to use it, but it’s great to have the

protection there, along with Dell Compellent

Copilot Support,” says Harper. “They are

part of what this whole upgrade is all about:

building in redundancy and partnering with

people who understand what we need in

order to provide citizens with the efficient

local government they pay for.”

For Davenport Group, Nash County is part of

a bigger picture. Says Paul Clifford, president

and co-founder of Davenport Group: “IT

needs have gone through the roof for local

governments, and financial resources are

decreasing. The saying ‘Do more with less’

has been familiar to local government IT

teams for a long time—and that’s why Dell is

such a good fit. Working with Dell solutions

such as Compellent and EqualLogic, we’ve

helped more than 25 local government

organizations get results similar to Nash

County, maximizing their ability to handle

growth and be flexible.”

Availability and terms of Dell Services vary by region. For more information, visit dell.com/servicedescriptions © October 2012. This case study is for informational purposes only. Dell makes no warranties—express or implied—in this case study. Reference number: 10009982

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