The City of Maryville, TN With Pillar After Evaluating EMC

The City of Maryville, Tenn. is saving its taxpayers more than $100,000 a year by standardizing its data storage on the Axiom from Pillar Data Systems.

By leveraging the Axiom’s virtualization capabilities, the city is saving an estimated $7,000 to $8,000 each time they set up a new virtual machine. The new virtualized environment also drastically cut its electricity consumption. In addition to cost and energy savings, the city is saving valuable management time. The IT staff can build a virtual machine in 20 minutes versus the one to two days it takes to add a new physical server, which would have required a lengthy budget approval process.

The city’s IT staff serves departments including police, fire, electricity, water and sewer, public works, human resources, finance, planning and building codes, engineering, 911 emergency response and its seven schools. With a charter that covers nearly all the municipal departments in the city, reliability and scalability were priorities.

Another important consideration when evaluating storage systems was compliance associated with the Tennessee Valley Authority, for which the city is an electricity distributor. The compliance requirements, coupled with the fact that the city is responsible for the data from all municipal departments, made it necessary to beef up its disaster recovery plan. The neighboring City of Alcoa also has an Axiom deployed, so the cities decided to back up each other’s data and share GIS information for emergencies.

Improvements in uptime were critical to the City. With its legacy storage system, when a service was interrupted, the utility’s billing systems couldn’t take payments, the police couldn’t look up information during traffic stops, email went down, and the school library databases went down. These are just some of the problems the IT staff faced before deploying the Pillar Axiom.

“It’s always refreshing to see examples of the practical linkage from IT improvements to real-world impacts,” said Mark Peters, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “In this particular instance the way that Pillar’s products are architected to automatically and simply reduce the costs, time, space and energy required for efficient storage is manifested as management time and resources that can be reallocated to efforts more directly supporting and improving the school system.”

The City of Maryville evaluated products from Pillar and EMC before picking the Axiom, based largely on its simplified management and easy scalability. In fact, the Axiom’s ease of management has allowed the IT staff to focus on more value-rich operations in its data center. In June, the IT organization achieved a 100 percent on-time record with its helpdesk calls, for which it credits the Axiom.