Zero Downtime Since 2010: Powering Mission-Critical Applications for the City of Carmel

Unparalleled Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

Since installing DataCore, there have been several occasions where there was an issue at one of the two sites that caused an outage. With DataCore, the City of Carmel always has a mirrored copy of data at the other site and has been able to seamlessly failover, either proactively (in the event of maintenance) or reactively in the event of an outage. For example, as a rapidly growing city, Carmel has many construction projects occurring simultaneously at any time. In one instance when a contractor mistakenly cut fiber, the city was able to keep working and the end users were completely unaware of the problem because the second site was up. Maintenance is also much simpler because IT can fail over to one side.

“It is so important to keep our systems up and running at all times. DataCore software-defined storage gives me peace of mind because I know I can rely on it, along with outstanding support from both Mirazon and DataCore,” stated Chike. “DataCore is an excellent solution that has been rock solid.”

Extending the Life of Existing Hardware: In a budget-conscious municipal environment, being fiscally prudent is a necessity. IT doesn’t always have the funding required for a hardware refresh on the vendor’s recommended schedule. DataCore has allowed the city to extend the life of its existing hardware assets beyond the recommended useful life, without creating a performance impact.

DataCore essentially enabled the City of Carmel to skip an entire refresh cycle, which typically occurs every five years. The city was able to keep its legacy storage in place for a span of eight to nine years because of the functionality provided by DataCore. Given that the City of Carmel has more than 50 TB of storage mirrored between the two sites, the ability to prolong the life of the equipment for three years saved an estimated $75,000 in hardware costs.

Flexibility

An important benefit that DataCore provides to the City of Carmel is that it is vendor agnostic and can work across multiple hardware platforms. Since the initial installation of DataCore, the City of Carmel has grown from 30 virtual machines to 80 without any issues and has changed every single component of its environment during that period, including networking, servers, and storage. DataCore allows the city to be very flexible in the evolution of its IT infrastructure—without ever requiring a forklift upgrade.

“The fact that we can use DataCore across multiple types of hardware platforms is a huge benefit for the City of Carmel,” said Chike. “We love that DataCore can essentially work on anything.”

Furthermore, as a long-time DataCore user, the City of Carmel has been able to upgrade through its maintenance price without paying to re-do the software stack or performing any “throw it all away” major upgrades. “That’s been wonderful for us,” added Chike. “When we purchase additional storage through DataCore, we don’t have to buy everything else again, and we can just simply add it.”

DataCore’s RAM caching, I/O processing, and auto-tiering features have also enabled the city to add more high-performance workloads to its system, including multiple instances of SQL server, without a significant investment in high-end storage equipment such as all-flash arrays.

Ease of Use

Unlike many complicated IT solutions, DataCore is effortless to manage. “DataCore just works; we can basically just turn it on, configure it and walk away,” said Chike. Furthermore, one person can manage DataCore easily, which helps save the City of Carmel in personnel costs.

Outstanding Customer Support: Chike notes that the support from both DataCore and Mirazon has been excellent. She added, “DataCore offers an extremely high level of quality support, and they take care of the issue with no finger pointing at all. They figure out what the problem is and fix it, no matter what.”