Business Challenge
The City of Milwaukee Water Works provides water and services to more than 860,000 residents, wholesale and retail customers. Their IT infrastructure needs to support various departments including engineering, water quality and customer services, with phone systems, databases, billing and web services. They were looking for a high availability solution – two data centers that mirrored one another – so that even if one failed, the other would continue to support internal and external customers.
“We were faced with the challenge of needing two data centers that mirrored one another, so that even if we lost one complete site our internal and external customers would not be negatively impacted”, said George Knops, the City of Milwaukee Water Works’ Network Administrator. “It’s never easy to justify or get approval on a ‘just in case’ solution so we needed something that was fool proof, yet affordable”.
Solution
The City of Milwaukee looked at various solutions but found them too complex, lacking necessary support or unable to provide what they required at an acceptable price. Further investigation revealed StorMagic’s SvSAN.
George adds, “In minutes we were able to present datastores to our environment. Working with the technical support, which was nothing short of awesome, we were able to try the mirrored storage.”
Why StorMagic
SvSAN is a plugin for the vCenter Server and is managed in vSphere, which meant the City of Milwaukee were quickly and easily up and running with two reliable, duplicate sites.
With SvSAN’s 2 server solution, the City of Milwaukee avoids the high cost of implementing and maintaining dual SAN storage plus all the extra switches and power consumption.
Their SvSAN solution enables the City of Milwaukee to achieve their business continuity initiative – high availability access to datastores allowing them to maintain online applications without disruption.