County 911 department dispatches a modern approach to safety in New Jersey with hybrid cloud

When it comes to technology, even a 911 department needs a helping hand sometimes.

Challenge:

A New Jersey county needed to migrate their 911 call center from an antiquated three-tier infrastructure to a modernized hybrid cloud environment for a more streamlined and secure operation. The call center is responsible for fielding hundreds of emergency calls each day for 16 police departments, 30 fire departments, 14 fire and rescue squads, and four mobile intensive care units.

Troubleshooting the incumbent infrastructure had become difficult, and there was no longer technical support available due to its age. The customer needed an easy-to-manage solution that would consolidate their servers to one centralized location while also providing automation between systems.

Solution:

SHI proposed a Dell EMC VxRail solution – a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) appliance powerful enough to handle the county’s demanding workloads. SHI bolstered the solution by adding VMware NSX Data Center Enterprise Plus. This extra layer of security was necessary for housing Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS)-compliant data.

To ensure the customer felt confident with the offering, SHI performed demos of each component in our Customer Innovation Center, showcasing how the adoption of the new technology would transform their environment.

Upon approval, SHI migrated 30 virtual machines to the newly installed VxRail vSphere cluster, then tested and verified the migrations. SHI’s architects designed, documented, and performed the VMware NSX deployment while providing usage and maintenance knowledge transfer to the county’s small IT team.

Outcome:

The new infrastructure delivered greater performance, reliability, and flexibility, while the NSX micro-segmentation offered advanced security inside their data center. This easy-to-manage solution relieved their overwhelmed IT staff, while consolidating seven different servers into one centralized location.

SHI and the county also worked on a disaster recovery and business continuity strategy.