Reference no: EM133312821
Case Study: If necessity is the mother of invention, then Rock County, Wisconsin, has necessarily positioned itself on the leading edge of technological innovation. Supporting 29 different county departments, Rock County's IT team faces the same economic and budget realities confronting governments throughout the country. But Rock County officials are attempting to lower the cost of county operations through the use of technology. Cost-effectiveness is especially important in this jurisdiction of nearly 154,000 people located in the economically hard-hit southeastern section of Wisconsin. Rock County serves citizens scattered over 720 square miles on an annual budget of about $145 million.
"The pervasive theme of our county operation right now is driven by our budget realities," said Mickey Crittenden, director of IT for Rock County. "We can't necessarily seek the latest and greatest hardware and software-although we would like to-instead, we're focused on using technology to lower overall costs. And we've been quite successful in doing that."
Cost management has come in many forms for this large county that stretches along the meandering Rock River. But the overriding principles are basic: standardization and simplification. Consolidation has been a key issue-especially for servers. "We're trying to simplify our infrastructure by limiting the number of servers that we have installed throughout our data centers," Crittenden explained. "The big benefit of this is that it is easier to manage fewer servers, and there's also significant cost savings with licensing and maintenance of the equipment." Previously, all applications in use by the 29 departments were hosted on servers distributed over several sites. Varying hardware and systems spaced throughout the county made interagency communications nearly impossible and maintenance a costly nightmare.
In consolidating servers-including Hewlett-Packard (HP) NetServers, 9000 series, e3000 series, and HP ProLiant servers-Rock County centralized its processing resources. This provided the county with a centralized, highly adaptive system that is secure, scalable, and easily managed. The change saved time and money as IT staff members had to support fewer types of servers and continued to seek new and inventive ways to stretch shrinking budget dollars.
HP StorageWorks tape library enabled Rock County officials to quickly perform automatic backups each evening. "We're a lights-out operation at night, and we're using our tape library to back up all our servers and make sure all those servers are up and running in the morning without worrying that a backup procedure hasn't finished," Crittenden said.
Despite the consolidation initiative's extraordinary success, Rock County's IT workers manage a smaller number of servers overall. Uptime is maximized, and communication between county ISs is nearly seamless. IT professionals easily deploy new applications from a single source instead of traveling from department to department, or worse yet, from desktop to desktop. Once an application is placed on a server, it is available to all who might need it, remotely. "The result is a savings of tens of thousands of dollars for Rock County taxpayers," said Crittenden.
A storage area network (SAN) also helps maximize the use of county IT resources. Linking storage equipment on a single network allows Rock County to use the devices more efficiently. "Previously, we had servers with directly attached storage," explained Crittenden. "That meant some servers would be using 95 percent of their available disk space while others would be using only 15 percent. We just didn't have the storage where we needed it." HP SAN technology lets the county consolidate disk storage and allocate the capacity according to application requirements.
High-volume printing at county offices is also a cause for high costs. The IT Department had examined ways to cut these costs. "HP is helping us with the process of determining whether it is better to perhaps use one very capable high-end printer with a variety of features and functionality for a given department rather than having separate locally attached printers for employees," explained Crittenden. Currently, Rock County owns more than 500 heavily used HP laser printers. Only two of them are linked to a network through a server for centralized printing. Printer centralization allows agencies to better manage their printing and imaging needs, which can reduce overall expenses and increase user productivity. Crittenden believes the county's current centralization efforts will provide even greater IT efficiencies and cost savings
In another cost-saving and efficiency-driving move, Crittenden has ventured onto the leading edge of technology by further empowering Rock County's current 1,000 desktop machines through implementation of a thin-client desktop strategy. A thin client is any personal computer that uses resources of a server rather than its own. Thus, the machine each employee uses will be much cheaper because it needs only a small hard disk. All applications and data will reside on the servers to which these personal computers are linked, and all files saved by county workers will be saved on the servers or SAN disks. If access to more software and files is required, the same desktops can still be used. Instead of upgrading them, the power of the servers can be upgraded, or the servers themselves, rather than 1,000 desktop computers, can be replaced.
Question 1. Why is centralization of resources-storage devices, application servers, and printers-so important in the particular case of Rock County?
Question 2. A SAN enables Rock County to use storage device more efficiently. Do further research on the difference in storage allocation between DAS and SAN. How does the SAN enable more efficient storage than the previous DAS arrangement at the county?
Question 3. Centralized printing can increase productivity only if offices are not dispersed over a large area. Why?
Question 4. What was the major change that reduced the cost of maintenance by the IT Department?