Unisys & Tarrant County
Breakthrough: Tarrant County Improves Agility for Better Service and Support.
Imagine it.

Provide uninterrupted service – and rapid response – to constituents through improved e-government service delivery.

Done.

Tarrant County chose a Unisys ES7000/one Enterprise Server in conjunction with VMware® ESX Server virtualization software to support its e-government functions with a highly available, responsive, real-time infrastructure.

 
Unisys & Tarrant County (.wmv, 5:14)

Streamlined Infrastructure Management

Tarrant County uses Unisys ES7000/one Enterprise Servers and a VMware ESX Server to improve service delivery for its criminal justice and e-government arenas, while reducing the complexities and costs associated with infrastructure management and improving performance. The county has dozens of virtual servers running on the scalable ES7000/one server platform. New virtual servers can be provisioned in days to support development, test, and production activities.

 

Metrics

Business Challenge: Creating a Highly Available, Redundant, Real-Time Environment 

As the third largest county in Texas – and one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the United States – Tarrant County has 5,000-plus employees and supports 43 law enforcement agencies. Frequently recognized as a technology leader, the county is known for delivering superior e-government services – from tax assessment to criminal justice.

 

As large numbers of people moved into the area, Tarrant County found this increased demand for services overwhelmed its IT infrastructure. “We were adding physical servers by leaps and bounds. With our staffing situation, we weren’t able to support and maintain a sufficient infrastructure,” explains Jan Allred, project manager for IT Operations for Tarrant County.

 

The county strives to provide continuous service and rapid responses to all constituents, while also meeting IT service-level agreements within its business units. It was critical to find a cost-effective solution that met its evolving needs and helped to reduce spending, while avoiding additional headcount.

 

The existing relationship with Unisys – along with its proven expertise in creating resilient, agile environments – made a Unisys solution the best choice for Tarrant County’s challenges. Tarrant County implemented Unisys ES7000/one Enterprise Servers and VMware ESX Server to create a real-time infrastructure that could support a new integrated justice system, and then be extended to address other agencies’ requirements. “We settled on a virtualization strategy to ensure the IT agility, speed, high availability, disaster recovery, and business continuity needed to support our key e-government initiatives,” says Allred.

 

Solution: Streamlined Infrastructure Management via Virtualization

Today, Tarrant County has dozens of virtual servers running in the ES7000/one server environment with near-term plans to add dozens more. The virtualized environment hosts a range of applications spanning the county’s development, test, and production areas.

 

Unisys devoted extensive planning and development in creating Tarrant County’s solution. “Unisys worked closely with my staff during installation of the ESX Servers on the ES7000/one Server environment. They created templates for our operating systems so we didn’t have to build everything from scratch ourselves. The Unisys commitment to our success – even in our planning stages – was invaluable. With Unisys help, we implemented this solution quickly and effectively – and now that we’re up and running, it has exceeded all our expectations,” comments Steve Doane, server systems manager.

 

“Within a month of implementing this project – and having our web servers and test/development systems in place – full production web servers were brought online,” continues Doane. “Now, we can provide better services to constituents and employees. Plus, as our criminal justice system expands, we’ll easily accommodate growth with more reliability and simpler management.”

 

Without the VMware and Unisys backbone, we’re out of business. It’s that simple.
D. Miles Brissette
Assistant Criminal District Attorney
Tarrant County

All of Tarrant County’s business with law enforcement agencies is now done electronically through its case management system. “Without the VMware and Unisys backbone, we’re out of business. It’s that simple,” explains Assistant Criminal District Attorney for Tarrant County, D. Miles Brissette.

 

Results: Better Constituent Service through Increased Agility and Information Access

Tarrant County is enjoying immediate results with its new Unisys solution, including:

We’ve considerably improved our ability to deliver services. We’re now able to provision servers for development, test, and production within days as opposed to weeks.
Steve Doane
Server Systems Manager
Tarrant County

Since implementing its virtual environment, Tarrant County is enjoying greater agility and cost savings. “We’ve considerably improved our ability to deliver services. We’re now able to provision servers for development, test, and production within days as opposed to weeks,” explains Doane. What’s more, managing the new virtual server environment is now much simpler, with updates and patches executed from a single console.”

 

“We’ve already grown our virtualization effort 300 percent over plan – to 61 virtual servers and counting. We’re adding more services, gaining more uptime and availability, and enjoying more resiliency – without adding significant dollars to the infrastructure or increasing headcount. In addition, our new infrastructure design improves our ability to respond to unplanned initiatives,” comments Allred.

 

We’re managing more servers with fewer resources -- growing the number of servers supported by each member of the server group by 20 percent.
Jan Allred
Project Manager, IT Operations
Tarrant County

Spending taxpayer monies wisely is important. With the new environment, Tarrant County moves defendants through the justice system more quickly, which reduces prisoner housing costs. In addition, the county has lowered data center infrastructure costs. “We’re managing more servers with fewer resources -- growing the number of servers supported by each member of the server group by 20 percent,” explains Allred.

 

The new solution offers vastly improved recovery capabilities. “Recovering a bare-bones virtual server is roughly 40-percent faster because we have a complete image of the server backed up on disk,” comments Allred. “We don’t have to rebuild from an empty box, reload the operating system, and then restore the applications and data.”

 

Moving forward, Tarrant County is well positioned to support the agencies it serves – handling new initiatives head-on. “Working with the IT team, we will be able to easily, and more flexibly, address legislative changes that impact our criminal justice applications,” says Brissette. “Rapidly meeting these demands is critical given the some 60,000 cases that we prosecute annually.”  Other agencies, including the Tarrant County Tax Office, expect to reap similar benefits from the agility inherent in the county’s new real-time infrastructure.

 

The Relationship: A Partnership Built on Teamwork and Trust

Unisys is as committed to our success as we are.
Jan Allred
Project Manager, IT Operations
Tarrant County

According to Tarrant County, Unisys delivered knowledge, as well as skill transfer. Allred explains, “Unisys is as committed to our success as we are. We appreciate what Unisys has been able to provide us in terms of support, implementation, and planning services. This team effort was a perfect blend of our staff working with Unisys personnel and leveraging their expertise to build a highly resilient, available, and agile environment.”

 

Profile: Tarrant County

Solution at a Glance

 

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