US Tax Collector Enhances Data Availability with HYCU and Nutanix

Business Challenge

The Lee County Tax Collector’s Office was using a backup and recovery solution for its existing VMware deployment. Given the sensitive nature of the data stored, ensuring its security and availability are critically important elements for the organization.

While it maintains its backups on a four-month cycle, the Tax Collector’s Office needed a more effective way of managing the space required to do so. It has approximately 50 virtual servers and replicates backups and virtual machines (VMs) to an offsite disaster recovery location.

“At the time, we did not perform any backups to the cloud. This led us to identify the hyper-converged data center route as the best fit for our needs, given the speed improvements it would allow. Our existing backup system experienced significant delays resulting from the distance the data had to travel between our virtual servers and where it was stored,” said Ron Joray, ITS Assistant Manager at Lee County Tax Collector’s Offices

Solution

After hearing about the benefits Nutanix and HYCU were delivering to organizations

Joray approached partner Alturna-Tech for a demonstration.

“From what we saw, the HYCU and Nutanix approach would deliver the greatest benefits in terms of our particular requirements. It was a powerful solution that delivered most of the functionality of VMware, but with the added benefit of no ongoing costs,” said Joray.

According to Fidel Deforte, Solutions Architect at Alturna-Tech, the Tax Collector’s Office does not only work with taxes but with other valuable data as well.

“For example, you have real estate brokers going online and using the services of the Office to conduct searches against their system, non-stop. Ron and his team have been very successful in managing this as they are forward-thinking and continually identifying areas for improvement. With HYCU and Nutanix this would deliver even more demonstratable business benefits,” said Deforte.

Benefits

Search optimization

Using its in-house custom applications and HYCU, the Tax Collector’s Office was able to improve the time it took to search for tax records from 12 seconds to 4 seconds. When searching records, time is of the essence, so the efficiency improvements for the organization in addition to this capability have been significant.

Speedy restores

HYCU has enabled the organization to restore data from its latest backup within seconds, thus delivering even greater efficiency benefits

Effective backups

Traditionally, the Tax Collector performed a full backup of its data at the end of each working week, on Fridays. However, with HYCU automatically monitoring for data changes and performing a full backup whenever it is warranted, staff can focus on more strategic functions inside the organization.

Enhancing maintenance

With HYCU, the Lee County Tax Collector Office is now able to maintain its 50 individual servers and all the related infrastructure with a limited number of resources.

About the customer

Located in Cape Coral in Southwest Florida on the Gulf Coast, the Lee County Tax Collector’s Office is focused on achieving financial accountability and delivering operational excellence for citizens in the county.