City’s Information Technology Director recognized
By Edel Fonseca, Information Technology Analyst

When Derrick Arias, Information Technology Director with the City of Sunny Isles Beach, moved with the rest of city staff into the new government center in 2004, Arias was tasked with supporting new software applications and data growth. Realizing the need for the city’s growing storage needs, Derrick sought an affordable solution, which ended up being iSCSI technology from Sencilo Solutions, a company in Lake Mary, Florida.

The implementation of iSCSI technology at city hall is proving to be an immeasurable benefit in the scope of the city’s technological future. iSCSI offers a variety of functions and operability allowing the systems administrators innovative operations such as:
• backup without a degradation in the network’s performance,
• management of computing resources separately from the storage resources,
• trouble-free integration and sharing a pool of storage which will basically eliminate downtime associated with backup or storage growth.

By employing this tool the city will reduce the overall costs of day-to-day computer operations, and also allow the city to implement the new and exciting cutting edge technology of virtualization. Virtualization will allow the consolidation of the server workload onto fewer servers, with the potential to cut maintenance costs in half and increase server utilization to a previously unattainable range. It also facilitates the streamlining of software patching, and the evaluation of new applications and operating systems by allowing systems administrators to test in a secure virtual machine and be able to roll back to a clean slate by employing snapshots.

Virtualization simplifies server provisioning as well, since all that needs to be done is to build a virtual machine once and it can be easily deployed multiple times. Integration of an iSCSI/virtual environment is the ideal choice for disaster recovery, planning, and provisioning for the future growth of data file storage.

On February 22, 2007, Brian McCarthy, President of Sencilo Solutions, presented a plaque to Derrick with a reprint of an article in the January Infostor: Why SMBs are embracing iSCSI, part 1 by Kevin Komiega. The City of Sunny Isles Beach was a case study for this article with Arias widely quoted.

You can find the article on the web at this address:
http://www.infostor.com/display_article/282016/23/ARTCL/none/none/Why-SMBs-are-embracing-iSCSI,-part-1

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