- Client: Located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office is led by Sheriff Sid Gautreaux and is responsible for enforcing the laws of Louisiana within East Baton Rouge, as well as maintaining the East Baton Rouge Prison.
- Situation: EBRSO uses over 80 applications that run on PCs, laptops, MDTs, and handhelds. This requires a robust network and server infrastructure. Most of EBRSO’s 36 servers were at least 6-8 years old and running Windows 2000/2003. Despite being a law enforcement agency, disaster recovery preparation was minimal and what was there came with very high recovery time. Due to the server sprawl and lack of automated monitoring and remediation system, 16 IT dept. team members were running around fighting one fire after another.
- Solution: The 36 servers were virtualized to 4 physical servers using Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V. This saved EBRSO over $150,000 in server and hardware costs alone. Two Dell Compellent SANs were used to provide redundancy as they replicated data between two geographical sites.
- Benefit: 36 servers were virtually consolidated down to 4 for maximum savings. From routine downtime, EBRSO achieved 100% uptime for all servers. Replacement of third party monitoring tools with integrated Microsoft System Center Essentials resulted in substantial License savings. Net savings estimated to result in direct savings of $300K and an annual savings of over $240K by the streamlining of operations.
