City optimizes citizen services while driving financial flexibility and IT performance.
The City of Bloomington, Illinois, is leveraging Pure Storage’s platform to drive financial flexibility, on-demand scale and sustainability – while improving citizen services in the digital age.
Home to approximately 80,000 citizens, the City of Bloomington is one of the most productive agricultural regions in the country and boasts a robust economy, resulting from a diverse mix of sectors – from manufacturing and medicine to education and entertainment, among others.
Due to fiscal challenges in the past, the city was forced to make strategic cutbacks that affected critical infrastructure investments, including data storage systems.
Over the course of a decade, the combination of expired storage system support contracts and makeshift solutions, like jump drives and low-cost arrays, added significant complexity to the city’s IT management and maintenance efforts.
The growing volume of public safety data, however, prompted a shift back to IT modernisation leveraging Pure Storage’s reliable, efficient, and secure data storage platform.
Pure Storage, consumed via an Evergreen//Flex subscription, provides financial flexibility, simplicity and performance to support the City of Bloomington’s delivery of critical citizen services.
Benefits include:
- Reduced Data Centre Footprint: Pure Storage helps the City of Bloomington efficiently manage data growth to serve citizens in the digital age, without the added footprint. With Pure Storage, the City’s storage went from 48U to 7U in the data centre, representing an 85% reduction. As a result, the City’s IT team gains greater efficiency to focus on other critical initiatives, including creating data retention policies and contributing to regional efforts to bolster the local economy through innovation.
- Flexible, Grow-as-you-Go Data Storage: Leveraging Pure Storage FlashArray via an Evergreen//Flex subscription gives the City of Bloomington the flexibility to pay only for the amount of storage used, with the advantages of on-premises storage ownership. The City now has ongoing access to the latest hardware, monitored and managed 24/7 by Pure Storage. At the same time, the City now has full visibility into its storage environment via the Pure1® AIOps management console.
- Faster Access to Critical Data: Public safety, including the increasing use of police body cameras, was driving exponential data growth for the City of Bloomington. However, with public safety videos residing on Pure Storage FlashArray, which is optimised for capacity, the City gains faster access to this critical safety data for its citizens. FlashArray also serves as the backup repository for Veeam – which the City uses together with SafeMode Snapshots for fast recovery in the event of a cyber (or physical) incident.
Craig McBeath, Director of IT, City of Bloomington, said: “Pure Storage has revolutionized our approach to IT with unparalleled flexibility, simplicity and performance across our data storage environment.
“We now carry the confidence of constant vigilance, providing significant peace of mind, while gaining the ability to effectively deliver and scale superior citizen services.”
McBeath has been with the City of Bloomington for 26 years, starting as an IT Support Specialist.
When he was promoted to Director of IT, he inherited responsibility for a jumble of disparate storage technologies that had been long neglected due to budget constraints put in place a decade earlier.
Support contracts for many of these systems had expired and needed to be replaced, creating a large amount of maintenance work for the IT team.
Temporary solutions like using jump drives or other low-cost storage arrays only added to the management complexity of the storage environment.
At the same time, public safety – namely the increasing use of police body cameras – was driving exponential data growth.
Other departments were also adding to the data load as part of the City’s overall Digital Transformation.
This combination of factors, coupled with a new data governance initiative, prompted McBeath to pave the way for major IT modernization.
“I appreciate being able to serve and help the community that I live in and love to be better.
“In my new role, I can influence meaningful change to provide better services and support for city departments and constituents,” he said.
McBeath and his team selected Pure Storage to replace the City’s aging and unsupported storage technology.
All primary workloads, including VMware ESX and Microsoft SQL Server, run on Pure Storage FlashArray//X. Public safety videos reside on Pure Storage FlashArray//C, which is optimized for capacity. It also serves as the backup repository for Veeam, which the City uses together with SafeMode Snapshots for fast recovery.
The Evergreen//Flex subscription underpins both FlashArray systems, giving the City the flexibility to pay only for the amount of storage being used, combined with the advantages of on-premises storage ownership.
“Evergreen//Flex gives us on-demand storage, a predictable expense, and an easy path to standardize on Pure Storage without having to ask city council for more budget for capital purchases,” said McBeath.
As part of their Evergreen//Flex subscription, the City will always have the latest hardware – monitored and managed 24/7 by Pure Storage engineers.
At the same time, McBeath and his team have full visibility into the storage environment via the Pure1 AIOps management console.
“Having the full support of Pure Storage takes a huge load off our small team,” said McBeath.
“Knowing that there are eyes on our environment at all hours, and that we won’t walk into work fearing the worst each morning, gives us significant peace of mind.”
The Pure Storage platform resolved all latency and performance issues with the City’s video management systems, enabling investigators to recall and replay any video quickly and easily.
It can also handle data growth as the City continues to transform its operations to serve citizens in the digital age – but without the added footprint.
With Pure Storage, the City’s storage went from 48U to 7U in the data center, representing an 85% reduction.
All of this translates to greater efficiencies that enable McBeath and his team to focus on other initiatives.
These include creating data retention policies and contributing to regional efforts to bolster the local economy through innovation.
“Pure Storage stands above the rest in terms of flexibility, simplicity, performance and support,” said McBeath. “It felt like we were able to press the ‘easy button’ and Pure made everything better.”
