Case Study: City of Norwich, CT

Population: 39,136
Sites: City Hall, Police Department

• Cost-Effective IT Environment
• Business Continuity

As the city’s servers and Networked Attached Storage (NAS) were nearing their end-of-life status, they were slow, caused network bottlenecks and required lots of attention from the IT staff. “It was a pain in the neck to manage, and we didn't have access to the system," said Ray LaRose, the city’s LAN Technician.

The Police Department, which was on a different set of servers but required the NAS for back-up, was generating and consuming lots of data. The entire system did not have the data deduplication and compression capabilities to make it more efficient. As a 24x7 operation, they had problems when people were coming on or off shifts and logging into system to file reports. Sometimes the systems would time-out as they logged in.

The city’s previous managed service provider did not provide the city’s staff with the ability to do quick system updates themselves or restore system snapshots. Since many issues required the MSP to intervene the cost of operations skyrocketed when adding in the additional external and internal costs for those issues to be resolved. “The ROI didn't pan out for our existing environment,” said Ray.

When Ray and IT Director, Leon Barnowski, developed their Request for Proposal (RFP) to replace the existing system, they emphasized capabilities such as ease of manageability, 10G networking and all solid-state disks. They started looking at more traditional server/storage solutions, but from experience they found those lent themselves to finger-pointing among the various vendors when it came to problem resolution. Ray and Leon wanted a single, comprehensive solution from one vendor. As Leon said, “We want one throat to choke.”

Flagship responded with a traditional server/storage solution, as did the other RFP respondents, met the stated capabilities and were under their budget constraints. However, Flagship looked beyond what the RFP stated and read into the issues that the City was truly trying to solve. The proposal comprised Nutanix Hyperconverged infrastructure with an all-flash array, 3 network nodes and Veeam back-up and replication system between City Hall and the Police Department.

When Ray started investigating the Nutanix solution and talked with colleagues at other city IT departments, he got excited. "Flagship’s solution uniquely met or exceeded all the requirements in the RFP," said Ray.

Implementation was quick and easy for the city. The Flagship team spent one day at City Hall, and then completed the install at the Police Department a month later. Ray was impressed with the team’s pre-planning. The team didn’t waste time doing on-site configuration changes and down-time was limited to a half hour.

The new system has fulfilled on the desire for ease of maintenance. "The manageability is just so much easier. With a single pane of glass, I can just go into the virtual machine and expand the storage if needed without a lot of steps," said Ray. “Plus, we have insights into the analytics that we never had before.”

The new solution provides more flexibility and scalability with the Veeam back-ups on the Nutanix servers. "We now have 3 different back-up strategies. Two are just set it and forget it,” said Ray.

“We can expand and do cross-location additions that we couldn't do before, and stay within our budget," said Leon.

What set Flagship apart for Ray and Leon was the options that were clearly laid out in the proposal and the collaborative approach Flagship took with the City to develop the final solution.

"Lots of vendors don't think the client is going to review proposals in detail. With Flagship, it felt like a partnership. It was cooperative effort," said Leon Barnowski.