Tackling The (Data) Monster Of Mohave

"Our problem? Too much data," says Mike Matthews, IT director for Mohave, a sprawling county in northwestern Arizona. "Our ArcGIS (geographic information system) alone is a monster data eater, incorporating TIFF images of the entire county; that's over 13,000 square miles. The graphics files are huge."

But the GIS was only part of the problem. County documents were also being scanned and stored as TIFF files on the same system that handled a wide variety of other county functions.

"A lot of our applications were growing," says Matthews. "We were running RAID 5 and thought we had plenty of disk until the ‘out of disk' messages started. We could have tried limiting what people could do, for example, automatically deleting e-mails after 30 days. But everybody wants their data, so we knew we had to expand capacity."

At the time, the IT department was storing data on Dell servers in a direct-attached configuration. Any disk expansion required that volumes be rebuilt from scratch, which had to be done on weekends so as not to interrupt operations. Even with hot spares in place, a run of failures could, and did, degrade system operation. It was clear that the existing system was going to have to be replaced.