Dell has assisted the Housing Authority of the Cherokee Nation (HACN) to cut IT workloads by up to 50 percent by deploying IT infrastructure.
The enterprise IT vendor has deployed Dell software, server, storage and backup solutions to ensure delivery of housing assistance to more than 315,000 citizens of the Cherokee Nation, the largest Native American tribe in the United States.
Dell’s IT infrastructure ensured server virtualization, simplified network storage, fast network connectivity, reliable data backup and recovery and maximum data availability for nearly 200 HACN employees at 19 offices across 14 counties in Northeastern Oklahoma.
“Having reliable backup and recovery is essential to the Housing Authority — if systems or data cannot be restored in a timely manner, it could affect the entire organization,” said Tonia Williams, CIO and IT director of the Housing Authority of the Cherokee Nation.
The organization’s five-person IT team overcame major budget and time constraints to deploy a Dell-driven infrastructure, including Dell PowerEdge blade servers to accommodate a heavily virtualized Microsoft Hyper-V environment.
HACN implemented Dell Storage PS Series arrays to help optimize both storage performance and capacity. HACN deployed the backup and recovery software.
Dell AppAssure allowed HACN to implement backup, recovery and replication capabilities with a minimal learning curve. HACN safeguards 31 virtual machines by taking snapshots of most of them every three hours. HACN has recovered an entire virtual server in less than 15 minutes. Previously, restoring from tape-based backups used to take hours.
Global deduplication, combined with an initial 3:1 storage compression ratio, has enabled HACN to reduce storage costs while yielding major savings in operating costs.
“We have saved a great deal of time, which ultimately is staff salary,” said Williams. “AppAssure has cleared up as much as 50 percent of staff time that now can be focused proactively on other critical business needs, such as disaster recovery.”
Baburajan K
editor@infotechlead.com
