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Santa Cruz County

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Replace an aging, costly network infrastructure with a high-performing and easier-to-maintain alternative.

About

Santa Cruz County had an aging Cisco network infrastructure that was costly to support. The county wanted more modern network technology that would provide better performance with a lower total cost of ownership.

At the same time, state and county spending cuts challenged Santa Cruz County to maintain the current technology with a shrinking budget.

The Customer's Challenge

Santa Cruz’s aging network infrastructure solution had an estimated lifecycle of two years. This added on costly services that were required to support the solution. Bottlenecks at gigabit bandwidth led to performance problems for Santa Cruz County, and due to the cost of the solution and maintenance services, the county couldn’t afford any redundancy or failover.

How DataEndure helped

DataEndure recommended replacing the Cisco network infrastructure with Brocade. The new Brocade solution would reduce capital and maintenance costs while delivering higher performance. Brocade switches integrate with the Cisco network, so the county was able to conduct the upgrade incrementally, helping to deliver better performance while staying within the limited budget.

Pleased with the performance of the new solution, Santa Cruz County then planned to replace 50 Cisco Edge switches and two core switches with Brocade. “Brocade made it affordable for us to go from a gigabit to a 10-gigabit network,” said Tammy Weigl, Data Center Manager at Santa Cruz County. “We’re migrating now, and have already seen one of our biggest bottlenecks clear up. The time for our 45-terabyte full backup has been reduced by about one-third, saving us a day.”

60% lower annual maintenance costs and 20% lower initial costs

Increased bandwidth from 1 gigabit to 10 gigabits

Increased resilience with redundancy and failover for switches

Weekly check-ins from DataEndure

The Benefit

After making the switch to Brocade, Santa Cruz County was able to meet their network goals while still staying within budget. Since they could upgrade their network incrementally, the performance increased, but costs were contained. Santa Cruz County experienced 60% lower annual maintenance costs, and the bottlenecks that were holding them up disappeared. Due to the affordability of the solution, Santa Cruz County was also able to afford redundancy and failover for switches, making them more resilient.

Service and support also made a major difference. “DataEndure touches base with us every week,” Weigl explained. “Brocade, once a month. The Cisco rep lives in our county, but I heard from him once in five years. And Brocade sent pre-sales engineers to help us for two days and make sure our users were comfortable—we never got that from Cisco.”

Why Santa Cruz County went with DataEndure and Brocade

This figure shows the side-by-side comparison between Santa Cruz County’s original solution and their new Brocade solution. Aside from lower costs, the county was able to increase resilience and performance and received frequent check-ins from both DataEndure and Brocade.

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