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Fulton County, Georgia

CASE StuDy:
CouNty it DEpArtmENt
Fulton County, Georgia
Fulton County, Georgia, Optimizes Taxpayer Dollars
Through Server-Consolidation Strategy Based on
Fujitsu PRIMERGY and PRIMEQUEST Servers
CHALLENGE: The County of Fulton in Georgia provides services to about 1 million residents.
An infrastructure-consolidation project quickly consumed available data center floor space
with aging servers. IT managers wanted to find a way to more economically and efficiently
consolidate servers in a highly complex environment.
A FuLL-SErviCE CouNty it DEpArtmENt
The Fulton County government in Georgia, which includes the city of Atlanta, serves about 1
mil ion residents, supporting a ful range of services from the court system to tax collection to
human services. Fulton County’s 5,500 employees are scattered across 70 facilities, although
the vast majority of them are concentrated in a few locations.
SoLutioN:
To increase efficiency and optimize taxpayer contributions, the county’s CIO adopted a
To meet these chal enges, Fulton
server-consolidation strategy. He sent out a communication to departmental IT staffers to
County managers adopted a
launch the project.
server-consolidation strategy.
Leveraging virtualization
“We call it the ‘Statue of Liberty email,’” said Jay Terrel , CTO and deputy director of IT for
technology, legacy Wintel servers
Fulton County. “We asked IT managers to send us their tired, huddled servers. At that time,
are being consolidated onto
discrete locations were each maintaining their own servers. And some of them weren’t backing
Fujitsu PRIMERGY® Series Server
up data. So implementing a server-consolidation strategy to cut administration costs and start
Blades. To economical y support
using consistent data backup policies was the right thing to do.”
Oracle® databases, managers
also elected to deploy Intel®
The CIO’s plan struck a chord, and servers began flooding into his facility. So many, in fact, that
Itanium® 2-based PRIMEQUEST®
the county soon faced a number of new challenges.
servers leveraging Red Hat®
Enterprise Linux.
“Almost immediately, we had a lack of physical space to house the servers,” explained Terrel .
BENEFit:
“We also found that among the 250 or so Wintel servers we had, the majority were being
Based on internal testing,
grossly underutilized.”
managers expect to consolidate
under-utilized legacy servers onto
Among the consolidated server pool were a number of aging legacy boxes, some as old as seven
virtualized PRIMERGY servers at
years. Administrators found that the mean-time-between-failure (MTBF) for these servers was
a ratio of up to 8:1. The enhanced
shrinking, and that overal , a significant portion of their time was spent managing them.
Fujitsu administration tools and
remote access capabilities
Collectively, these challenges triggered a decision to seek more powerful servers. And that
have reduced management
process led the county to choose a server-virtualization strategy.
labor hours by 25 percent,
and virtualization has dropped
FujitSu primErGy WiNS HEAD-to-HEAD CompEtitioN
server deployment time by 89
Like most government entities, Fulton County uses a competitive bid process when purchasing
percent—from six hours to 40
new equipment. While cost was a driving factor in the final selection, so too was the need
minutes.
to find a solution that real y performed. And it had to interoperate wel with the county’s 54
terabytes of backend tiered storage.
“We considered three alternatives,” said David Medlin, network administrator for Fulton County.
“We quickly narrowed that down to two and put them side-by-side to do some scenario testing.”
In the end, the Fujitsu PRIMERGY won out over competitors. According to Medlin, “We require a lot
of redundancies in our servers to meet our uptime objectives in support of public safety—police,
fire, E-911. The Fujitsu blade servers have redundant power, cooling, and I/O.”
The Fujitsu server administration tools also impressed the county technical evaluators. “My team
found that the Fujitsu administration tools were more feature rich and user friendly than the other
vendor’s tools,” said Medlin. While these were important considerations, the evaluators were
concerned about the compatibility of the new servers with their enterprise storage.
“We have 54 terabytes of tiered storage,” explained Brooks Virtue, senior storage architect for
Fulton County. “We wanted to make sure that the blade servers we were considering would mesh in
our SAN fabric and interoperate with our Brocade/McDATA switches.”
What were the consequences of going with a solution that failed to achieve this?
“Had we gone with the other vendor, we would have had to reengineer al our storage connections
and architecture,” explained Virtue. “That would have been expensive, time consuming, and difficult
to maintain. The Fujitsu servers avoided all that, which was a plus in their favor.”
ADoptiNG AN EFFECtivE virtuALizAtioN StrAtEGy to BooSt
SErvEr utiLizAtioN
“We didn’t start off looking for a virtualization solution,” said Keith Dickie, assistant director of
networks for Fulton County. “But as we became more familiar with the Fujitsu solution, we realized
its robust qualities could leverage VMware® to achieve a more efficient virtualization operational
model. Compared to a standalone server model to support applications, we project our new
virtualized model wil deliver up to 8:1 service. That’s going to free up badly needed real estate in
our data centers.”
The PRIMERGY blade servers provide the Intel® Xeon® dual-core and quad-core processor
computing power that the county needs to achieve these consolidation ratios. Additional y,
“The new virtualized solution wil allow us to size-on-the-fly to right-size virtual servers for each
application,” explained Terrel . “That wil give us some real leverage against hardware purchases.”
Currently, the county is managing about 200 servers. Baseline testing showed that server utilization
rates were in the 30-40 percent range. Based on internal testing of the PRIMERGY blade servers,
managers believe they can boost that rate up to 80 percent or more in a virtual environment, making
it much more cost-effective than before.
A pHASED impLEmENtAtioN pLAN
The IT team is using a phased approach to migrate about 12 rack-mounted servers per month.
“We expect to complete migrating more than 100 servers within a year,” stated Terrel .
Dry runs have supported the promise virtualization holds for drastical y cutting the time to provision
new servers. To date, testing showed a provision time drop of 89 percent - from 6 hours to 40 minutes.
“It would take us about six hours to provision a conventional server,” explained Terrel . “That would
include the installation of the operating system, the loading of the drivers, system updates, antivirus
software, backup agents, and everything else. The VMware and PRIMERGY solution has given us
the ability to clone a server in as little as 15 minutes—with a high side of 40 minutes being a very
defensible number.”
In addition to provisioning time savings, fail-over speeds support the county’s high-availability
environment. “A dying server wil be back up on another PRIMERGY blade within five minutes,”
stated Terrel . “We have tested this many times and will stand by that number.”
The Fujitsu PRIMERGY BX600
ADDrESSiNG tHE DAtA CENtEr rEAL EStAtE proBLEm
“Because we’re so early in the virtualization process, we haven’t experienced the space-saving
ratios yet that we anticipate,” explained Terrel . “However, the Fujitsu PRIMERGY blade servers have
helped tremendously because we’re not bringing in new servers at the rate we used to. The density
of the blades allows us to support new applications with fewer servers.”
NEW SoLutioNS: CutS mAiNtENANCE By 25 pErCENt
Previously, county technicians had to be onsite to administer servers during their limited
maintenance windows.
“Once a month we have what we cal ‘Maintenance Sunday,’” recalled Medlin. “The administrators
had no remote power management capability, so we had people lining up to get to monitors
and servers. With the Fujitsu blades we can now do that remotely. I estimate that wil cut our
administration labor hours by 25 percent over the long term.”
An added advantage of the PRIMERGY servers has been the retirement of old servers that were
taking up a lot of administrators’ time. “Many of our servers were at end of life,” said Terrel . “The
MTBF was approaching unacceptable levels. Many of the same issues kept popping up and overal ,
we spent a lot of time looking after those servers.”
primEQuESt SELECtED to Support orACLE DAtABASE
ENviroNmENt
The second part of the server-consolidation project focused on the infrastructure underpinning the
county’s Oracle databases.
“These support our justice system, ERP, tax, and library systems,” said Terrel . “Our criteria
included being able to run the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system and delivering improved
performance for an economical price.”
In-depth, side-by-side testing showed that the Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST server best met the county’s
requirements. “They have excellent expandability, reliability, and frankly, deliver a lot more hardware
for the same money as the competitor we evaluated,” explained Terrel .
CouNty EvALuAtorS LikED A NumBEr oF otHEr QuALitiES oF
tHE FujitSu SoLutioN AS WELL.
“An attractive feature of the PRIMEQUEST servers is the ability to partition them for two different
operating systems,” added Dickie. “We’l be able to create a redundancy of services to meet our
uptime objectives. And by having a single platform for our databases, I’l reduce my maintenance
costs and labor hours.”
tHE FujitSu CuStomEr ExpEriENCE
As a group, Fulton County managers were impressed with the end-to-end quality of the service the
Fujitsu staff delivered.
To date, Terrell rates the service the county has received as “extremely good,” for both pre-
and post-sales support. With an experienced in-house team managing a relatively complex
environment, county technicians asked detailed questions of Fujitsu up front.
“Our team wil shoot holes in fluffy vendor proposals in a New York minute,” explained Terrel .
“Companies often make aggressive claims about their products. But the Fujitsu contacts
consistently do their homework and give us accurate answers to our questions.”
“Fujitsu gave us exceptional pre-sales support,” added Dickie. “We challenged them on various
issues and they addressed each in turn. That established a level of trust early on.”
The Fujitsu
PRIMEQUEST
580 Server
ABout FujitSu AmEriCA
Fujitsu America, inc.
Fujitsu America, Inc. provides a complete portfolio of business technology services, computing
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All rights reserved.
FPC58-1928-03 04/09.
09.0230