INX Signed With Bay Area Air Quality Management District

INX, Inc. has signed a 5-year agreement to deliver its Virtual Infrastructure Recovery Service for the IT environment of Bay Area Air Quality Management District.

Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) is the regional, government agency that regulates sources of air pollution within the nine San Francisco Bay Area Counties. BAAQMD is an innovative organization that awards millions of dollars to fund local projects designed to reduce the Bay Area’s carbon footprint. Due to the nature of their operation, BAAQMD has a low tolerance for downtime.

BAAQMD engaged INX to virtualize their production data center with VMware ESX Servers to eliminate unplanned server outages, dramatically reduce the time involved in tasks such as server provisioning and to reduce the agency’s carbon footprint and IT expenses. Sixty physical servers were virtualized onto seven VMware ESX host servers, eliminating nearly 300 tons of annual CO2 emissions and saving over $50,000 in annual energy costs alone.

"We were very pleased with the high availability, power reductions and cost savings that resulted from INX’s VMware deployment," said John Chiladakis, Director of Information Services for BAAQMD. "Now we are taking the next step and utilizing virtualization to ensure rapid recovery in the event of a catastrophe to our San Francisco offices, such as an earthquake or fire. We are replicating all of our business critical servers themselves to INX’s DR facility."

INX’s hosted disaster recovery offering, ‘Virtual Infrastructure Recovery Service’, is hosted out of top tier Data Centers in the Sacramento area. INX utilizes VMware along with proprietary methodologies to enable both efficient replication and recovery of virtual machines.

Steve Kaplan, Vice President of INX’s data center virtualization practice, said, "BAAQMD is a forward thinking organization that very quickly realized the benefits that virtualization brings both to their production and disaster recovery environments."

Mark Hilz, President of INX commented: "Most DR environments sit idle other than when being tested. We’ve built a world-class virtual infrastructure enabling us to leverage facility, equipment, software and expert staffing resources over a large number of geographically disparate clients. This enables us to provide a superior DR solution at a lower cost than organizations could possibly achieve internally. Our contracts include mandatory semi-annual testing. We want our clients to know that our DR service actually works ‘ it’s not just there to achieve an auditor check off."