Hurricane-proof data center built inside 770,000 gallon water tank

CommVault Simpana software to back up to aXiotech Emprise 7000 SAN. Xiotech’s TimeScale continuous data protection (CDP) system is then used to replicate that SAN to another Xiotech 7000 SAN at the city’s disaster recovery site. Each of the SANs has 25TB of capacity. Xiotech’s ICON Manager interface gives the IT team a single point of management for all of its storage activities.

The SAN is mirrored, everything’s virtualized, we have CDP,” DiGioia says. “It’s just a night-and-day experience.”

Backups are kept on disk for thirty days and then overwritten, and tape is no longer used. Documents are archived on optical disc and microfilm.

Choosing a partner

DiGioia told Mearian that he selected Xiotech Corp. as his SAN vendor because its previous service on technology the city owned had been outstanding, and other vendors, including Hewlett-Packard and Dell, didn’t seem interested in an operation as small as his. DiGioia says he also looked into using NetApp but felt it couldn’t offer the level of service Xiotech could.

 

DiGioia says Xiotech demonstrated that it was “interested in the long haul” rather than “a hit-and-run” at Altamonte Springs. “Xiotech was extremely responsive to us. I have access to the right people,” he says. “I’ve never had a problem with the device as a whole, and everything was always a smooth transition with them.”

In order to meet recovery objectives for city’s various departments, DiGioia met with each of them, determining their individual needs and tweaking systems to meet those needs.

The new, more highly automated infrastructure enabled the city to set up an online IT help desk, which is able to provide instant feedback on department service requests along with estimated times for ticket completions. “Before, we’d have problems and submit them and they’d get lost,” Apfelback says.

The new data center also meant the fire department’s and building office’s Web sites and intranet would no longer experience three-to-four-day outages every month. With the increased bandwidth and reliability, DiGioia’s office was also able to launch a new online building-permitting and inspection request system. Handling 1,100 to 1,400 inspection requests and up to 250 permit inquiries each month, the new online application system has streamlined how customers submit and track their requests.

<>”For our customers, they can go on online 24/7, 365 days a year and request inspections and see the status of their inspections,” Apfelback says. “It’s really brought us into the next century and where we need to be from a customer service standpoint, both internally and externally.”