It’s a big job and like all large enterprises, DWR needed a flexible and highly reliable technology environment to carry out its mission. To improve its technology agility, capabilities, capacity, and effectiveness the CNRA and DWR transformed the existing Tier III Data Center into a Software-Defined Data Center (SDCC). DWR also aimed to significantly reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in their network vs. legacy vendors and the high cost of maintenance and ownership prevalent across the State of California.
With one data center in Sacramento and a disaster recovery site in Nevada, the department supports over 3,000 agency systems/applications, many of which are compute-intensive scientific, analytics, engineering, public safety, and GIS workloads. All applications and services communicate over a virtualized core network. The IT team uses the California Department of Water Resources. The California Natural Resources Agency (CNRA) consists of 33 different organization entities whose mission is to restore, protect, and manage the state’s natural, historical and cultural resources for current and future generations using creative approaches and solutions based on technology, science, engineering, and collaboration. One of the largest departments within the agency is the Department of Water Resources (DWR) who supplies and manages the water delivery systems for California, provides flood protection through improvement of California’s levees, inspects 1,200 dams, and helps coordinate the state’s integrated water management strategies. As the custodian of the CNRA data center and private cloud-shared services, DWR provides infrastructure and platform as a service to the other organizations within the CNRA. Modern virtualized network to manage and secure workload through the use of micro-segregation, which allows tenants and applications to be effectively segregated for security. “We deliver critical applications that need various data center capabilities to function,” said Tony Morshed, Chief Technology Officer for the CNRA and DWR. “As we have evolved our data centers, we’ve always looked to improve performance and management efficiency. Most recently, we needed to make the data center much more agile to meet changing needs.”
Download Report
