Municipalities face a set of unique IT challenges as they attempt to support all the departments necessary to manage a city—such as emergency services, waste disposal, and roadway maintenance. In this blog, we take a look at three customer stories that highlight how HCI adoption—and the use of Scale Computing HC3 in particular—has grown within the local government sector. We also explore some of the reasons behind this adoption trend and hear from city IT department representatives about their own experiences, in their own words.
Havre de Grace, Maryland
Havre de Grace’s two-person IT team wanted to replace the city’s aging hardware and deliver a more streamlined, reliable, and effective service for its 13,000 residents. With stretched resources, they also needed a single vendor to provide a one-stop-shop for all their IT support requirements. The city’s IT team deployed Scale Computing HC3 to achieve these aims while increasing the availability of their virtual machines at the same time.
“Scale Computing’s easy-to-understand dashboard makes monitoring system performance and resources a no-brainer. Creating a new VM is a snap—our prior HP Hyper-V node/SAN was far more complicated to manage,” said Jeff Thompson, IT manager, Havre de Grace, Maryland. “We love Scale Computing and look forward to being a customer for many years to come!”
Pewaukee, Wisconsin
Located in Wisconsin, the city of Pewaukee's government chose Scale Computing HC3 to improve disaster recovery, replace aging hardware, and reduce operational costs. Since deployment, Bobby Kewan, the city's IT director, has seen improved availability of critical workloads and witnessed enhanced IT scalability. Scale Computing HC3 has also reduced the time his team spends on infrastructure management by between 10% and 24%.
St. Cloud, Minnesota
Nestled between the Mississippi and Sauk rivers, St. Cloud is the 10th largest city in Minnesota. St. Cloud has a population of over 66,000 people and is currently enjoying a population boom.
The city’s IT department and services were struggling to keep pace with the growing number of residents. It was clear that St. Cloud needed a new cost-effective, responsive, and innovative solution. The city’s IT team had deployed a virtualized IT infrastructure to handle services throughout the city. But the tipping point came when the team began a three-year project to launch a new ERP solution to handle core finance, HR, payroll, utility billing, and community development applications.
The old system simply could not cope, and the team turned to Scale Computing HC3 for a more affordable and straightforward solution—one that could deliver lower latency and included professional and knowledgeable support.
“The ease of deployment and upgrades allows us to focus our time on working on the servers as compared to the virtual environment the servers exist in. Not having to deal with multiple vendors when an issue does arise, allows us to focus on the issues, rather than contact a vendor to determine if the issue is with their component or another component," said Andrew Neussendorfer, software developer and IS technical support, St. Cloud, Minnesota.
As these examples illustrate, many cities rely on just one or two dedicated tech personnel—and many of the issues they face come to the fore as cities grow, and demand for resources increases. Municipalities are making the switch to HCI and Scale Computing HC3 to deal with these challenges. This is because Scale Computing HC3 provides local governments with an all-in-one, appliance-based system to simplify their IT operations. It brings storage, servers, virtualization, and management together in a single, innovative, and highly reliable solution.
Switching to HCI and adopting Scale Computing HC3 ensures the IT infrastructures belonging to districts and cities remain cost-effective, responsive, simple, and scalable and, of course, fully recoverable in the event of a disaster. By avoiding the high cost of managing overly complex infrastructure systems, IT departments can redirect their funds towards better operational processes and the software solutions they need.