In Summit County, Ohio’s fourth most populous county, their Board of Elections entire network infrastructure is managed by a team of just two full-time IT professionals. With an aging server infrastructure and a heavily scrutinized Presidential election fast approaching, this IT dynamic duo needed to modernize their systems, comply with strict new security directives, and do so in an expedited time-frame.
THE IT CHALLENGE: DOING MORE WITH LESS
Every U.S. Presidential election is a landmark event. But few elections have been as closely watched and analyzed as the 2020 elections -- especially in the perennial battleground state of Ohio. With an outdated infrastructure sorely in need of updating, Summit County’s Board of Elections’ two IT leaders, Kevin Moreland and Wayne Darlington, were tasked with identifying and deploying new infrastructure technology ahead of the November election.
Moreland describes their charter as follows: “we’re responsible for administering clear, transparent and sound elections. Our job is to ensure that all of the technical aspects of an election run smoothly – from programming the ballots to keeping accurate voting records to ensuring that we have assigned them to the proper precinct so voters receive the right ballot.”
Of the many technology mandates they needed to abide by, security was by far the most pressing. Because their infrastructure supported an array of applications – from voter registration databases to tabulation systems and ballot scanners – the new security directive established following the 2016 election stipulated that certain systems be segregated and isolated from the others.
Time, or the lack of it, was another major concern. As Darlington recalls, "We also were very much in a serious time crunch as the Secretary of State's office gave us just seven months to go from, ‘here's the directive which you have to execute to one hundred percent. And, oh yeah, in between that, you guys still have your November general election.'"
Further complicating their efforts, all 88 counties in Ohio are governed by their own rules which operate independent of one another. Accordingly, all Ohio counties would need to be compliant but it was up to each one to figure out how to meet these requirements. Says Darlington, “this was both a challenge and an opportunity as it essentially gave us a blank slate from which to imagine and design a new infrastructure environment that would not only meet our immediate needs but would be flexible enough to accommodate our future requirements as well.”
Beyond the many technical and operational considerations, there were also budgetary constraints. Says Moreland, “we consulted with several vendors and the dollars just kept adding up and in the government sector, dollars aren’t always easy to come by.”
“Every decision we make comes down to, ‘can you make it through a Presidential election’? We knew we needed something that was intelligent, scalable, had built-in redundancy, and was cost-effective. Scale has delivered on all of these and more.”
— Kevin Moreland, Network & Systems Administrator, Summit County Board of Elections
THE APPROACH: MOVE FAST, BE SMART
Recognizing that there was no time to waste, the two IT pros set out on the hunt for a new solution that would address their various technology, security, and governance requirements. They learned about Scale Computing from a neighboring regional emergency dispatch center that had recently upgraded their own systems, and after watching some videos about the Scale Computing solution, they were cautiously optimistic that they had found their solution.
However, convincing a budget-strapped and risk averse Board of Elections to invest in a new and unproven technology stack represented another hurdle. Fortunately, Moreland and Darlington had built up enough goodwill over the past decade that they were able to secure budget to begin proving out the concept.
To meet the many requirements set out in CISA’s Security Directive, the two appreciated that the Scale Computing system made it easy for them to segment and isolate designated critical systems such as the County’s voter registration database. To maximize the efficiency of the new system, they also understood that virtualization would play a key role in maximizing their system resources.
As Moreland notes, “We went from an environment where we had about seven physical servers to a three node cluster. From that three node cluster, then we can spin up as many virtual servers as warranted by demand – this not only simplified our operational workload but it also dramatically shrunk our eco-footprint.”
“Every single thing that was ever explained, promised and demonstrated lived up to the expectation one hundred percent. Scale’s systems got us through this Presidential election and have put us in a great position for managing all aspects of future elections.”
— Wayne Darlington, Network & Systems Administrator, Summit Board of Elections
THE RESULTS: “A FLAWLESS ELECTION”
While Darlington and Moreland devote the majority of their time to managing IT projects throughout the year, during peak times leading up to elections they also must oversee the hundreds of part-time contractors. “During these times, you simply can’t focus on the IT infrastructure itself which is why it was so important that we have a system that could be fault-tolerant and essentially run itself,” says Darlington.
Morehouse adds that, “in our older environment it would have been almost impossible to do what we do now. After just a couple of conversations, we segmented out a portion of the network that was totally isolated from everything else, spun up a new server, cloned the drive, and mounted it to the server and boom, within a couple of hours our solution would be in compliance.”
Scale Computing’s ability to automatically snapshot and backup their systems to a remote cluster has also provided a critical layer of redundancy that provides them with some much needed peace of mind. Darlington notes, “that was one of the key advantages of the Scale system. Previously, If we had to restore our old system from a complete failure, we probably would be down for days. Now we can restore our systems in a matter of hours, or in some cases, minutes.”
Most of all though, this two-man team appreciates the availability of Scale Computing’s support team and their ability to quickly speak live with a highly trained expert when they encounter an issue. “When we start diving into technologies like virtualization where we don’t have VMWare experts on hand, we’d just be throwing money at consultants until it got fixed. At the end of the day, our new Scale-enabled infrastructure played a major role in helping Summit County execute a flawless election,” says Moreland.
CUSTOMER PROFILE
The Summit County Board of Elections in Ohio is responsible for securely managing the records of 370,000 registered voters and over one million citizen records.
IT CHALLENGES
- Two-person IT shop responsible for a large and active database of voter registration records
- Comply with new state and Federal security directives
- Abbreviated timeline to migrate, deploy, and test all their servers and apps
- Limited budget
THE SCALE COMPUTING SOLUTION
- Streamlined management
- Accelerated deployment
- Simplified virtualization
- Cost-effective
- Resilient, redundant & fault-tolerant
CUSTOMER RESULTS
- Consolidated seven servers to a cluster of three SC//HyperCore nodes in less than seven months
- Running a variety of commercial and homegrown apps on 12 VMs with the ability to easily spin up new instances
- Automated snapshots of servers are backed up to a remote cluster to provide full system redundancy
- Simplified management and operations enable their two-person team to focus on key operational priorities
- Agility of the SC//HyperCore cluster accelerated compliance requirements such as network segmentation
- Successfully deployed the new infrastructure on time and within budget