Riverbed reveals how Mahoning County reduced IT cost

Riverbed for business CIOsRiverbed has revealed how its SteelFusion, a Software-Defined Edge (SD-Edge) solution, allowed the Mahoning County, Ohio’s IT Department, to improve user experience of its citizens.

Riverbed said SteelFusion secured 100 percent of its data in the data center and delivered application performance. The SteelFusion solution has converged remote storage, server, backup and networking infrastructure into one small appliance.

County Auditor Ralph T Meacham and IT Director Jacob Williams are heading Mahoning County’s IT Department. The IT department supports 50 county governmental agencies operating in 20 locations. The department provides and maintains all of the information technology for the county’s 1,800 employees.

Meacham deployed a SteelFusion Core appliance in the county’s data center and SteelFusion Edge appliances at each of the remote sites. SteelFusion appliance replaces the entire previous IT infrastructure, enabling a significant cost savings. IT staff, which has been centralized, do not travel to the remote sites to maintain equipment or processes, adding to the savings.

Ohio’s IT Department has eliminated the problem of backups since all data is now stored and backed up centrally. Most importantly, Meacham has been able to automate offices that were previously paper-based and expand the use of IT in general.

Another example is the growing use of the county’s GIS, one of the best in Ohio, with high-resolution aerial images covering the entire county. Previously, the application was so data-intensive it was virtually unusable, except by people in the office where the server resided.

The IT investment allowed the IT team to upgrade agencies that were formerly paper-based to digital. SteelFusion also permits an expanded use of data-intensive applications such as geographic information systems (GIS).

“We needed to come up with new ideas and new ways of delivering a good computing environment, while at the same time covering the issue of data security,” Meacham said.

Riverbed is delivering solutions to help companies transition from legacy hardware to a new software-defined and cloud-centric approach to networking, and improve end user experience.

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