High-performing, efficient and reliable IT infrastructure for the government sector

Often supporting a number of departments, municipalities face unique IT challenges related to limitations on budgets and resources including a lack of dedicated IT staff. These challenges become more prominent as cities grow, increasing the need for additional resources. As a result, municipal IT infrastructures need to be cost-effective, responsive, simple, scalable and must include disaster recovery.

Located in Wisconsin, the Pewaukee government chose Scale Computing HC3 in its search for a solution able to improve disaster recovery, replace aging hardware and reduce operational costs. Since deploying HC3, the city saw improved availability of critical workloads and scalability of infrastructure, along with a 10-24 percent reduction in the amount of time the city’s IT staff spent managing their infrastructure.

“The system gave us much-needed hard drive space, increasing a VM’s hard drive space down from about 25 minutes to less than 10 minutes. The overall speed increase in regular production is also noticeable,” Bobby Kewan, IT director for the city said.

Nestled between the Mississippi and Sauk rivers, St. Cloud is the 10th largest city in Minnesota with a population of more than 66,000 people. As residents continued to move into the area, the city needed to update its public services to reflect the city’s growth in a cost-effective, responsive, innovative and professional manner.

Previously, St. Cloud deployed a legacy virtualization system for its IT infrastructure to handle services throughout the community. As the city began a three-year project launching a new ERP solution to handle core finance, HR, payroll, utility billing and community development applications, they turned to Scale Computing HC3 for its affordability, simplicity and low latency.

“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 in on the issues, rather than contact a vendor to determine if the issue is with their component, or another component,” Andrew Neussendorfer, software developer and IS technical support for St. Cloud said.

Municipalities are often serviced by a small IT staff with a limited budget. By avoiding the high cost of managing overly complex infrastructure systems, IT departments are able to redirect their funds towards better operational processes and the software solutions they need. The Scale Computing HC3 platform brings storage, servers, virtualization and management together in a single, comprehensive system that provides an innovative, reliable solution.