A New Jersey county authority upgrades aging SCADA architecture and saves over $800K

Customer Innovation Center serves as sandbox for testing suitable (and profitable) solutions.

Challenge:

A New Jersey county utility authority was in the process of modernizing its aging supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) architecture that manages four of its wastewater treatment sites throughout the region. SCADA is a control system that uses computers, network data communications, and graphical user interfaces for high-level process supervisory management. Theirs was nearing its 40th anniversary, which meant a refresh on its server and storage systems was a must.

The customer needed a solution that would support the county with high speed and availability, as well as offer scale and automation. This could be done by connecting the pump stations to one another while managing them from a single pane of glass.

Solution:

SHI introduced the county to the SHI Customer Innovation Center – an 8,000-square-foot "technology sandbox" where customers can test out new solutions to see how they would interact with existing technology in their environments. SHI’s certified IT experts performed demos of technical solutions specifically chosen to support the customer’s demanding workloads. After attending additional SHI-hosted workshops at our Executive Briefing Center, and meeting with several manufacturers, the customer fell in love with the integration of VMware on Dell EMC VxRail with Veeam as the backup solution.

Outcome:

The revamp, which lasted roughly a year, provided simplified management, better performance, and the ability to offer more advanced services in the future. The new solution also reduced the physical power and cooling footprint, and eliminated bottlenecks in the customer’s storage area network (SAN) infrastructure.

In the end, the customer saved over $860K in procurement and server costs.

Following the success of this initial VMware investment, SHI helped the county implement a VMware NSX virtualization solution as well.