How One California Agency Achieved 99.99% Uptime
When the California Natural Resources Agency consolidated IT resources from 29 departments, boards and commissions into a centralized private cloud, two of the biggest benefits were reduced costs and faster provisioning. The agency increased storage capacity by 300 percent, shrunk its physical storage footprint by 30 percent, reduced overall IT capital expenses by 42 percent and sped up provisioning by 70 percent.
But the new model also has the benefit of ensuring extremely high levels of uptime. For the agency, this isn’t merely a matter of convenience. Many mission-critical applications depend on the availability of the data center, meaning that downtime can severely impede the agency’s operations.
The California Natural Resources Agency uses the NetApp clustered Data ONTAP operating system in its private cloud, which enables non-disruptive operations. This means that the agency can add and maintain storage nodes without scheduling downtime windows, for example. Instead, data and virtual machines are simply moved to any other array.
This availability is so crucial to the agency because almost 98 percent of its applications are virtual servers that live on storage, including applications that help agency workers plan responses to fires and floods. Non-disruptive operations also ensure that employees don’t have to sit idle while IT conducts upgrades and refreshes.
The move helped the agency increase its uptime from 99 percent to 99.99 percent, and administrators anticipate reaching a goal of 99.999 percent availability.
Learn more about how the latest data center solutions are helping state and local agencies find success and efficiencies in our story, "State and Local Agencies Grapple with Evolving Data Center Needs."
