November, 2004 - The Mississippi Department of Human Services (MDHS) has selected Venture Technologies of Ridgeland, Mississippi to consolidate the Division of Family and Children Services existing server farm to a state-of-the-art blade server and SAN architecture. Under the contract, Venture will design and install a turnkey system consisting of the following:
- Three 42U racks and four IBM BladeCenter™ chassis to accommodate an initial capacity of forty-two (42) HS20 servers
- Two 1U Flat Panel Monitors and Remote Console Kits for centralized server access, management and administration
- A fully redundant Storage Area Network (SAN) consisting of an IBM FAStT700 Disk System with two DS4000 EXP700 Storage Expansion units populated with sufficient 146GB 10K RPM disks to deliver 2 Terabyte of on-line storage
- High-speed server to storage switching consisting of two McData Sphereon 4500 Fiber Channel switches.
- Server virtualization via IBM Director, Tivoli Storage Manager, and FalconStor solutions
- An IBM Linear Tape Open (LTO) Ultrium 2 drive unit with a scalable 36 cartridge (7.2TB) Tape Library for off-line backup processing
- Uninterruptible Power Supplies to accommodate 30 minutes uptime
Venture's services will also incorporate migration of the Agency's existing Windows and Citrix environment and the Division's core application – the Mississippi Automated Child Welfare Information System (MACWIS). Ultimately, the system will support over 700 simultaneous Agency workers located in county offices throughout the State. In addition, Venture will provide operational training and knowledge transfer to MDHS' IT staff related to operations, maintenance and support of the system.
A unique feature of this system is the use of FalconStor's IPStorŪ for enterprise storage environments. IPStorŪ provides SAN management and storage virtualization across heterogeneous server and storage environments. In the future, MDHS plans to use IPStorŪ to replicate data to a remote site. This would allow for rapid restore and recovery in the event of a disaster of catastrophic system failure. For more information visit www.falconstor.com.Venture will also design an implement a comprehensive anti-virus and security solution using tools and technology from Symantec www.symantec.com and SurfControl www.surfcontrol.com. SurfControl's web filtering architecture will be used to enforce the Agency's comprehensive Internet Use policy. Venture will work with MDHS to develop web filtering, threshold and criteria parameters, and bandwidth prioritization policies as to support the Agency's policies.
When complete, the new blade server/SAN solution will be housed in only 3 racks versus the old "rack-mounted" server farm that occupied over 5 racks. Ultimately the Agency benefits by increasing server and storage capacity, improving performance, improving reliability by eliminating single points of failure and decreasing administration and support (and costs) while saving on physical space.
Venture Technologies is an IT services company founded in 1985 by Gerard Gibert, CDP and Norman Katool, CPA and headquartered in Ridgeland, Mississippi. The company provides a variety of solutions including Network Design and Integration, Network Security, IP Telephony, Document Management, Web-Based Application Development and Data Center-Based Managed Services. Venture serves private and public sector clients across the Southeast with locations in Memphis, Birmingham, Nashville and Dallas.
For more information, contact Mark Frye, VP Sales and Marketing - AL/MS/FL or email jmfrye@ventech.com or Tom Cormany, VP Sales and Marketing - TN 901-937- 7101 or e-mail wtcormany@ventech.com or Kim McCarty, Senior Account Manager, Lousiana or kmccarty@ventech.com.