Vision Solutions has published an interesting case study about Skagit County Government in Mount Vernon, Wash. The county safeguards its public safety systems with Vision Solutions’ EchoStream and EchoCluster high availability and disaster recovery technology.
More than 400 users, including all of Skagit County’s law enforcement agencies, its jail, and 911 centers rely on a bullet-proof public safety system. Continuous system and database availability is critical for the county, and downtime is simply not an option during life-or-death circumstances, Vision reports.
Previous downtime experiences led county IT leaders to search for a high availability solution to assure uptime, protect the system and address the application performance challenges caused when backup jobs ran on the production system. Mainline Information Systems suggested Vision Solutions’ replication and clustering technologies for AIX—a fundamental reason the county switched to the AIX operating system and IBM hardware.
“Vision’s EchoStream for AIX and EchoCluster for AIX are exactly what we needed. They gave us all of the features and functions we wanted,” Ryan Johns, network engineer for Skagit County Government, says. “And the fact that I was able to install them myself, it’s amazing how simple it was.”
Skagit County relies on EchoStream’s RightTime CDP true continuous data protection to deliver nearly instantaneous recovery of applications and data at the push of a button. Unlike traditional backup solutions, EchoStream enables the recovery of data from any point in time, easily and rapidly.
“With EchoStream’s TimeView, you can create a fully interactive temporary copy of all or part of your database, in its current state or from almost any point back in time,” notes Doug Piper, vice president of product strategy for Vision Solutions.
"This means you can quickly have a safe, separate, fully accurate and fully functional test environment. When you're done, simply exit TimeView, without any worry about the integrity of your production data.”
In addition to the peace of mind from a fully redundant server and rapid failover capabilities for its public safety system, Skagit County realized a number of other benefits, such as increased performance by offloading some processing to the backup system.