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When Kane County CTO David Siles arrived in 2003, the IT environment included mainframes, a Token Ring network and a monolithic EMC Symmetrix storage system. His mandate was to eliminate the mainframe environment and put the county on the leading edge of technology, but budget constraints necessitated creativity to meet IT needs without dramatic cost increases. Siles decided that server virtualization and a storage area network (SAN) were the answers.

Kane County is the fourth-largest county in Illinois and one of the fastest growing in the United States. This county seat, with more than 1,500 employees and $460 million in revenue, provides critical services–including transportation, health, public safety, tax collection and law enforcement–to 480,000 residents.

The county’s challenges were partly a result of a Y2K conversion process that had configured a single server for every application–that meant a WAN with more than 70 servers and significant duplication in serving the county’s 45 departments. Each building and department had its own file server and print server, and each server contained highly underutilized internal disk storage. All the equipment was aging, warranties were expiring, data center space was limited, and power, HVAC and staffing costs were of concern.

The challenges were significant: upgrade the network; consolidate file, print and authentication servers; reduce the number of utility servers; reduce costs for HVAC, power and space; and provide better support with the same or fewer staff. At the same time, storage needs were growing, as the state requires county governments to keep an original copy of every official record. Plus, initiatives such as a paperless court system demand constant data availability.

Originally, Siles purchased network-attached storage (NAS) devices for file server consolidation. At the same time, he implemented VMware ESX Server and started by virtualizing print servers. He wanted to try iSCSI on the NAS, but because that feature had not been licensed upfront, it was an additional cost.

Siles needed additional storage capacity and investigated adding an iSCSI SAN. After doing some research into dedicated iSCSI storage solutions, he discovered EqualLogic at a trade show. “We did an internal bake-off and were impressed by the storage virtualization and data-management capabilities of EqualLogic’s PS Series storage array,” he says. So Kane County bought three PS300E arrays, adding 21 terabytes of iSCSI-based block storage to its infrastructure. EqualLogic providing advanced storage-management functionality at no extra cost was a key consideration in Siles’ decision.

Because of the primary data center’s location in a river valley, Kane County had invested heavily in a disaster-recovery strategy that includes running active-active hot data centers, so that all critical infrastructure is duplicated to higher ground at the remote site six miles away.

“My real problem is that our main campus is in a beautiful old seminary school that sits right in the valley of the Fox River,” says Siles. “So my worst disaster fear is not the building blowing up, but the dam upriver breaking, putting me under six feet of water. Our backup site is in the center of our new judicial building, which sits on one of the highest ridges in the county. Though the two facilities are geographically separate, the networks are flat, so the equipment over there thinks it is in the same room with the equipment over here.”

Today, Kane County’s infrastructure includes 48 miles of private fiber connecting facilities in a metropolitan area network. The two fully redundant hot data centers include six VMware ESX servers, three EqualLogic PS300E arrays (with three more currently being installed at the remote site) and a Cisco Gigabit Ethernet switch.

The county has gone from 84 physical servers to six, using 26 virtual servers and 58 virtual desktops. This has created numerous efficiencies, such as eliminating multiple copies of popular applications.

Virtualization also has enabled Siles to retire hardware without replacing it and to avoid the purchase of 100 new servers. In addition, he now can provide a new server in 10 minutes using seven standard images that are ready to deploy.

Data for mission-critical applications, particularly Microsoft Exchange and a Microsoft SQL tax database, are stored on the EqualLogic SAN and replicated over to the redundant site. Most processing occurs in the primary data center, but the remote data center can share workload when necessary.

Siles can use VMotion to move virtual machines to the remote site for additional processing, which can be accomplished during a standard workday, not after hours. Servers at the backup site can take over during routine maintenance, so users never experience loss of access to their applications.

Kane County’s highest-transaction, highest-performance need is for Microsoft Exchange, which is virtualized with VMware and EqualLogic’s virtual storage. “That’s mission critical, so it’s replicated to the EqualLogic array, along with our tax database,” says Siles. In addition, Cisco unified messaging is integrated with Exchange and all voice mail messages are stored on the SAN and replicated for business continuity.

To continue evolving the data center and for optimal integration with the iSCSI SAN, Siles is in the process of implementing VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 for native iSCSI support and automatic load balancing of virtual machines. Over time, Siles plans to deploy a fully virtualized desktop infrastructure, an effort he says was made possible by the total cost savings of $120,000 in eliminated hardware costs in the first year alone.

In addition, Kane County cut its power requirements in half, simplified its network by reducing port counts by 40%, and reduced network, rack and power hookup by 50%. Most of all, however, is the reduced downtime due to hardware maintenance needs or failure.

In the past, systems were down daily for one reason or another; but with virtualization, the county had only 20 minutes of total downtime in one year. In addition, Siles was able to return $1 million of last year’s budget–cost savings that were directly related to his deployment of new IT technologies.

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