Charlotte County Finds An Ideal Business Continuity Solution

Ensuring that 27 different local governmental departments have access to their critical applications in the event of some kind of IT failure is important for Charlotte County. “We live in hurricane country,” explains Mark Ramsey, operations manager of information technology for Charlotte County. “Business continuity and disaster recovery isn’t a ‘nice-to-have’, it’s a ‘need-to-have.’”
Charlotte County found an ideal business continuity solution by combining VMware Infrastructure 3 with LeftHand Network’s multisite SAN architecture. “We have two sites that contain VMware and LeftHand clusters,” says Ramsey. “If I have a failure at one site, the virtual machines that we’ve created using VMware technology will utilize VMware’s High Availability feature, show up at the other site, and re-establish connection with the same volume they were associated with at the other site. As a multi-site failover solution, you can’t ask for much more—VMware and LeftHand work together very effectively.”

Results
- Reduce recovery time from hours to minutes. “If we lost a site for whatever reason, it would take us no more than 20 minutes to restore data and give departments access to the critical applications and information that they need,” says Ramsey.
- Successfully migrate 1300 Exchange mailboxes. “Moving our Exchange mailboxes to VMware-based Exchange servers connected to a LeftHand iSCSI SAN has been painless,” says Ramsey. “My server guys and my help desk guys have been very happy about the move.”
- Achieve 10:1 server consolidation ratio. “We used to have 65 single-use servers, and by using VMware technology, we’ve been able to get that down to approximately six ESX Servers,” says Ramsey. “In addition to being easier to administer, that consolidation saves us the money it would cost to run all those extra physical boxes.”