New Castle County

Virtual Infrastructure Business Continuity Solution For New Castle County

The Client

New Castle County, Delaware serves over 60% of the state's population and covers an area of over 400 square miles. From ensuring public safety to governing land use, County government is tasked with providing a broad range of services to its citizens and businesses.

The Business Need

New Castle County was seeking an efficient and cost effective business continuity / disaster recovery strategy for its IT server infrastructure. The County was in the process of building a public safety facility and was seeking to leverage this building to house its business continuity hardware. In addition, like many organizations, as its IT infrastructure expanded, New Castle County was faced with ever increasing hardware costs, server sprawl and underutilized server hardware.

The Solution

Diamond Technologies provided consulting services to New Castle County for the implementation of a business continuity and server consolidation solution based on VMware products. The solution consisted of creating two VMware clusters, one at the County's main datacenter and the second at the County's new public safety building. The two clusters utilized storage on mirrored SAN arrays across their 1GB TLS link. During normal operations the individual clusters would run their local servers. In the event of an emergency, either cluster is capable of running all servers on the available cluster. The project was implemented in three stages: establishing a cluster at the Government Center to virtualize all possible servers; creating the second cluster at the public safety building to virtualize all possible servers there; and configuring and test recovering server(s) at the opposite sites.

Business Impact

An analysis of the total cost of ownership (TCO) estimates that the virtual infrastructure provided in this solution results in a ROI of 748.2% over a 3-year period based on the initial investment. From an environmental standpoint, the virtual infrastructure results in a reduction of 571,457 lbs (259 tons) of carbon emissions, equivalent to the average emissions of taking 48 cars off the road per year.*

*Source: VMware TCO/ROI calculator report