The government faces unique requirements when it comes to its technology. Whether local, state or federal, most government IT organizations must support multiple diverse departments while living within strict budgetary and staff resource limitations. But like private sector organizations, if the government IT staff is bogged down with mundane tasks, or putting out fires, they are unable to dedicate their time to more strategic initiatives that deliver greater value to their constituencies.
Clearly, this sector has a unique set of requirements for technology solutions that simplify management, protect sensitive government data and help to deliver smart digital services. So how can this be achieved, while ensuring the responsible expenditure of taxpayer dollars?
Say Goodbye to Legacy IT Infrastructure
When it comes to infrastructure, government IT organizations often lag behind their private-sector counterparts, stuck with legacy environments that have grown unruly over time – highly complex and expensive to manage. Unfortunately, the time government staff spends managing its systems may be the single most overlooked cost of the IT environment. Countless hours are typically dedicated to simply keeping the infrastructure running, and on routine tasks such as monitoring performance and manual updates.
For government organizations that recognize they cannot possibly wring one drip more from their continuously dwindling budgets and staff, there is an answer: hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). HCI is a software-centric approach that tightly integrates compute, storage and virtualization resources into a single system.
HCI – Simplicity, High Availability, Disaster Recovery, Scalability
By combining servers, storage, hypervisor, backup and disaster recovery into a single appliance, HCI enables the creation of IT environments that are easier to manage, highly available and scalable — not to mention, more affordable than ever before. HCI benefits include:
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- Simplicity – Government IT can enjoy an environment that is managed from a single web-based pane, offers automated storage management, and eliminates the downtime required for hardware and software system updates, as well as provides a single vendor support experience.
- High Availability/Disaster Recoverability – Government IT can eliminate downtime with redundant critical hardware components, automatic failover of virtual machines (VMs) from a failed appliance, replication and failover to remote systems, and intelligent self-healing automation.
- Scalability – Government IT can buy only what is needed today, and accommodate growth for years with seamless scale-out with automated storage configuration, mix-and-match hardware appliances and scale-out without downtime.
The Proof is in the Pudding
The City of Pewaukee, located in Wisconsin, is a prime example of a government organization reaping the rewards of HCI. The City of Pewaukee was in search of a solution not only to improve its disaster recovery, but to also upgrade its aging hardware and lower its operational costs. Making the shift to an HCI solution resulted in the municipality’s improved availability of critical workloads and scalability of infrastructure. The city also had a significant reduction, between 10-24 percent, in how many hours the city’s IT staff had to spend on infrastructure management.
Another example is the City of Havre de Grace, situated at the head of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, which experienced a successful transition away from legacy infrastructure in favor of an HCI solution. The city had only two IT staff and wanted a better system to replace its aging hardware that was needed to service the city’s 13,000 residents. By switching over to an HCI solution, the City of Havre de Grace was able to boost reliability, the availability of virtual machines and support from a single vendor.
HCI – Power and Control from the Data Center to the Edge
Simple, yet powerful, HCI transforms how government IT runs in the data center and at the edge. From home, to the field, to supporting missions around the world — HCI delivers the most effective and efficient solution to meet the unique requirements and goals of government IT.
