[Case Study] InfraStruxure System Makes Virtualization Possible

“The Wayne County IT Department supports a vast array of services and equipment for 25 departments, ranging from the Sheriff’s Office to the Health Department. Today, all government functions revolve around IT in one way or another so providing a stable and efficient data center is imperative, especially for law enforcement and 911 communications. To keep up, our data center was overflowing with individual servers for disparate systems without a way to effectively cool and power them.

“To solve growth issues, we decided to purchase a Storage Area Network (SAN) along with seven new virtualization servers. The goal was to dramatically reduce the number of physical servers we have to maintain, reduce electrical and cooling costs, and reduce the possibility of downtime due to server failures or maintenance. However, virtualization made power and cooling all the more important in a data center that was already extremely deficient in both areas.

“Our servers were on generator power but the building cooling and the server room air conditioner were not. If we lost power, the server would continue to run and overheat to the point of thermal shutdown. It was imperative to get adequate cooling to prevent the destruction of hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment. In addition, we needed a power system that would provide maximum uptime for servers during a power outage and eliminate the need for many stand-alone UPS units. Redundancy was also paramount.

“We decided on a 2N InfraStruxure setup. Since most of our equipment has two power supplies, this allowed us to plug each power supply into separate power sources. We were unsure how to approach our need for additional cooling and looked to APC for their recommendation: InRow RD cooling. We also chose StruxureWare Data Center Expert and NetBotz for monitoring. In the end, it was our confidence in the APC product line that determined the direction of the project.

“InfraStruxure is now playing a significant role in keeping our data center cooled and running and protected with complete redundancy. It will indirectly save money by reducing the possibility of downtime, ensuring system reliability and providing data integrity. Over time, we expect to have less downtime related to power issues, better performance, and longer server life expectancy due to having adequate cooling. We also have added peace of mind that our data center is well protected and highly efficient.”