Florida taps CDW-G For storage

The 9th Judicial Circuit Court of Florida has migrated from direct-attached to network-based storage in an effort to boost data protection.

The storage solution includes two Hewlett-Packard BL20p blade servers, two HP StorageWorks MSA1500 storage arrays and a Quantum autoloader. The court’s Fibre Channel storage-area network houses 7 T of raw storage.

A combination of an aging legacy storage environment and concerns regarding data loss prompted the court’s storage overhaul, according to Vic Berger, lead technologist at CDW-Government. The court’s direct-attached storage arrays were subject to intermittent failure, he said.

The court tapped CDW-G to install the SAN storage solution. The deployment was somewhat unusual for CDW-G, Berger said. In the Florida case, CDW-G provided all the equipment, integrated the hardware, shipped the solution to the customer, and dispatched post-sales engineers to setup and configure the solution. The company outsourced 7 x 24 maintenance of the system, but CDW relied on its own staff put the solution together.

“Historically, we haven’t done a lot of that,” Berger said, referring to the turnkey nature of the storage solution. He said the company is pursuing projects such as those in Florida more aggressively.

The storage system went into production earlier this year and Berger said CDW-G has an opportunity for follow-on work. The 9th Judicial Circuit Court of Florida covers Orange and Osceola counties in central Florida.