Data Center Colocation

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2016

The data center is the critical foundation of Maricopa County's ability to provide essential IT services to departments and citizens. At its core, the data center is a computer room fundamentally designed to be secure, reliable and resilient to failures; thus, earning the name “data center”. Very few IT systems are designed to survive a data center outage without significant downtime and data loss; Maricopa County systems are no exception. Many departmental computer rooms were end of life, exposing the County to significant risk and were uneconomical to improve. Therefore, the Office of Enterprise Technology (OET) formulated a plan with County Administration and the Board of Supervisors to address this problem through colocation of data centers to a Tier 3+ data center. This option saves the County substantial money, compared to remediation of existing computer rooms, while significantly reducing downtime and the risk of a significant IT outage. In May of 2015, OET completed the move of its data center to the hosted data center facility, including connecting the data center to a recently implemented 100 GB Optical Network Services (ONS) ring and OET’s hosted data center for disaster recovery. The hosted data center is also structured to accommodate the move of eight (8) other departments' IT data centers and computer rooms. While the County had a number of computer room facilities, many of them failed to meet modern, industry-accepted standards. The target data center, hosted by a global data center leader, was built to exceed the Tier 3+ standard that is now expected in large enterprise organizations. With a population of nearly four million people and 13,000 employees, Maricopa County is one of the largest county enterprises in the United States. In addition to the reduction in risk, the County will save approximately $10.51 million dollars over 10 years.