Large Government Organization Deploys Global Enterprise Management System
Situated in the heart of Virginia’s New River Valley, the City of Radford covers 9.5 square miles, serves 324 businesses and a population of 16,408. The City owns and operates its own modern water and electric utilities and has an extensive telecommunications infrastructure with all city, depend on this advanced technology infrastructure to support their on-going operations, so ensuring availability and reliability is critical.
IT Management Challenge
The City of Radford’s IT department is responsible for developing and delivering a technology vision that supports the goals and objectives of the City for both the present and the future. Their greatest challenge is maintaining the network infrastructure’s health and performance to deliver emergency dispatch, electric and water treatment departments.
With its mission critical operations dependent on IT service, 24x7 availability is an integral part of the City’s technology efforts. Donna Slusher, Network Administrator for the City of Radford, manages a diverse infrastructure including 13 servers, a Microsoft® Exchange system and over 625 work stations, printers, IP phones and cameras. Slusher is tasked with making sure the City of Radford’s network is always on and available.
To ensure availability and monitor the variety of devices, the City needed a proven system that would be proactive in diagnosing network health issues and resolving them before they could affect professionals in law enforcement, rescue or other essential services.
After an extensive vendor evaluation, dopplerVUE was chosen for its ease of use, ability to monitor a diverse IT environment, customizable views and its all in one solution form factor that requires no costly add-ons or additional modules.
“We looked at other vendor solutions, but they only focused on one technology set and were not as comprehensive as dopplerVUE. With its powerful mapping, intuitive dashboards, and bandwidth monitoring, it was the right solution for us and continues to serve us well three years later,” said Slusher.
Ensuring IT Operations While Reducing Costs
dopplerVUE helps the City of Radford realize its strategy for assuring that IT services are reliably delivered, while maximizing operational efficiencies to save costs.
• Increasing Infrastructure Reliability and End-User Productivity
In the past, an outage could be reported without warning, anytime by any department. Now with dopplerVUE, the City is able to proactively manage with real-time alerts and alarms before an issue affects performance, whether its network, application, server or security related.
• Improving Visibility for Enhanced Troubleshooting Effectiveness
dopplerVUE’s powerful mapping capabilities make troubleshooting much easier. With the intuitive interface the administrator can check on connections and find issues on any devices. “A picture is worth a thousand words and dopplerVUE’s ability to effectively visualize the IT environment really helps to clear up the confusion. dopplerVUE is able to help us quickly and easily create and customize dashboards so we can see what’s really going on in our network,” said Slusher.
• Enhancing Physical Security
With 125 cameras providing video surveillance throughout the City for such facilities as the water treatment plant, recreation center, police and fire departments there is a critical need to ensure that cameras are up and running at all times. With dopplerVUE, the City is able to monitor the health of the video cameras and the network to ensure availability and reliability in these security conscious environments.
• Reducing Costs and Increasing Efficiency
Like most organizations in these challenging economic times, the City of Radford is always looking to streamline costs and increase efficiency. “With dopplerVUE, we have been able to reduce our work order count by 80%, saving countless man hours and sizeable dollar amounts, while ensuring the availability of IT services for mission critical City operations,” explains Slusher. The City has been able to manage a multitude of devices and maintain critical services very efficiently without having to add costly modules, staff or training.
• Ensuring Seamless IT Operations with Dedicated Support
With a small staff getting timely and responsive support is critical to maintaining IT service levels for seamless City operations. “The dedicated support we receive with dopplerVUE is world class, their team really understands how we operate which is vital when people depend on the services we provide,” said Slusher.
