Durham County Government of North Carolina has migrated to a new data center network fabric based on Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI).
In the first phase of the project, all data center services will be migrated to the new ACI network. This will provide greater visibility into the network fabric and the applications that run on it.
The data center improvements are expected to complete in 2017.
With more than 280,000 residents in Durham County, the Cisco ACI solution will allow the Information Services & Technology (IS&T) staff to quickly develop and deploy new digital services.
Further, it is expected to provide a strong technology foundation to support County facilities and services including public safety, health, social services, and administrative functions.
“With the deployment of Cisco ACI, Durham County will serve as a public sector model for a leading-edge Software Defined Network and an application centric data center,” said Greg Marrow, CIO, Durham County.
“This aligns with the County’s goal for accountable, efficient and visionary government: streamlining our operations, saving energy and improving security for the services we provide residents and our business departments.”
There was another factor that drove Durham County Government into this network overhaul – the move toward “green technology.
The local authority wants to decrease environmental impact, lower energy costs and reduce operational costs of network infrastructure.
The new infrastructure is designed in such a way that it will provide improved data security, business continuity and disaster recovery to ensure the availability of services, applications and data.
“Working at a forward thinking organization like Durham County is extremely fulfilling because they understand the value of technology and support innovative employees,” said Seth M. Price, Senior Network Engineer for the county.
“When I began the process of redesigning our data center and chose the ACI platform, I had the full backing and trust from my management to design what will truly be a next generation data center. The freedom to be innovative and create positive change is what brought me to Durham County and what keeps me here today.
Cisco ACI is an SDN solution. It supports open APIs, open source, and open standards to optimize customer choice and flexibility.
Thailand’s Siam City Cement Public Company has built a new data center with Cisco’s UCS servers and Nexus switches, and used Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) to accelerate application delivery.
With these solutions in place, Siam City Cement made the switch to the new data center with only 15 minutes of downtime.
It was declared that performance for core applications has improved by more than 100 percent, and infrastructure delivery is guaranteed within 4 hours.
Alpha Technologies, KPIT Technologies, Qatar University, Symantec, Fujitsu, are some of the organisations leveraging ACI from the networking giant.
