Adams County, Washington, partners with Cerium Networks for strategic upgrades across its server, storage, network and communications infrastructure.
When Alex Igbinoba joined Adams Co., Wash., as IT Director, the county was experiencing problems with its physical and virtual servers, network switches, and other components of the IT infrastructure. The county was also running out of storage and facing limitations with its data backup systems.
Together, these issues were causing applications and services to run slowly, impacting productivity and the user experience. The IT team was also concerned that storage limitations could cause downtime and data loss. In addition, the county’s phone system lacked the features and reliability staff needed to serve their customers.
Igbinoba had worked with Cerium Networks when he was with the Adams County Health Department, where he was primarily responsible for the agency’s servers. The agency had partnered with Cerium for a server upgrade, and Igbinoba found the Cerium team to be knowledgeable, responsive and easy to work with.
Igbinoba asked Cerium to assess Adams County’s IT environment and recommend strategic upgrades that could mitigate the problems. Cerium’s network, data center and communications teams worked in tandem, with each team bringing its specific expertise while collaborating to develop an overall solution. Once the plan was in place, Cerium and Adams County completed 95 percent of the upgrades in less than six months, immediately improving performance and providing a foundation for future growth.
Solution: Strategic Upgrades Across the IT Environment
The project was broken down into three phases that were executed in tandem: server infrastructure, network infrastructure and phone system. The first phase involved upgrading the county’s servers to Dell PowerEdge R660 rack servers. The Dell servers occupy just 1U of rack space yet provide the performance to support demanding workloads.
Solution Partners
In the next phase, the Cerium team upgraded Adams County’s LAN and VLAN. Cerium replaced the county’s aging HP network switches with Cisco Catalyst 9500 switches in the network core and Catalyst 9200/9300 switches for access and aggregation. Designed for high-density fiber, the Cisco Catalyst 9500 provides 50G/25G and 400G/200G/100G ports for a flexible path to growth. The Cisco Catalyst 9200/9300 offers a modular approach with the port density needed to support growing numbers of users.
Cerium is completing the network upgrade with Cisco Meraki firewalls. The Cerium communications team is also completing the phone system upgrade.
Results: Immediate, 100 Percent Improvement
"There’s been 100 percent improvement, and I don’t have to worry about our servers and network anymore.”
Igbinoba said that Adams County saw immediate improvement when the server, storage and network upgrades were complete. He says he used to have to restart servers frequently to resolve performance problems. Now when he runs a server health check, the report shows that everything is functioning optimally. The network switches are working together and data packets aren’t being dropped. Most importantly, users are no longer reporting issues.
“People would say, ‘The network is slow. The system logged me out, I can’t log in.’ We’re not hearing that now,” Igbinoba said. “There’s been 100 percent improvement, and I don’t have to worry about our servers and network anymore.”
Igbinoba also praised Cerium’s handling of the project. The county got multiple proposals but preferred Cerium’s design. The Cerium team also planned and executed the upgrades in record time with minimal disruption to day-to-day operations.
“We didn’t have to wait for the project teams. Cerium had three teams working at the same time,” Igbinoba said. “If we missed meetings and got behind, Cerium was chasing us instead of the other way around. And if we requested a change, Cerium would get right on it instead of requiring a scope of work change ahead of time.”
In the past, Adams County has leveraged other vendors, but Igbinoba always wants to work with Cerium. The Cerium team continues to manage the county’s core infrastructure, and future projects are already being discussed.
“Cerium will be here as long as I am here,” Igbinoba said.
