Lessons Learned

When governor-elect Mitch Daniels took office in 2004, the state of Indiana had dozens of separate IT departments-all of which were ineffective.

"There were no real business processes in place," notes Gerry Weaver, now CIO for the Indiana Office of Technology (IOT). "There were no metrics. They used the 'build-it-and-they-will-come mentality.'"

At the start of the IT transformation, IOT met with each of the 70 state agencies it supports, negotiating services they would receive and cost savings they could expect. Information technology hardware and services were consolidated, and unfavorable vendor contracts were renegotiated. All of this saved at least US$24 million a year-and also improved service.

The state instituted its first-ever IT metrics, measuring 20 primary service areas. At first, all 20 services were red. In less than two years, 17 measurements had been raised to green and two to yellow.

Net Gain (cont.)

With the shot clock ticking, Indiana's Office of Technology puts a full-court press on revamping backup

A three-point play

The PureDisk pilot involved about a dozen servers used by the state's Department of Workforce Development, which was in the process of moving its Novell infrastructure over to Windows.

Soon into the 60-day evaluation, IOT was able to see the benefits of PureDisk. "I was immediately struck by how little bandwidth it took to back up the remote data to our data center," Rose says.

The initial backup saturated the remote offices' T1 bandwidth capacity (1.5Mbps); however, subsequent backups required a mere 10 percent of that bandwidth.

"Capturing the changes requires just a couple of hours, so we can easily accommodate that from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., after most government offices close, without impacting our wide area network (WAN)," Rose reports.

Impressed with the pilot, IOT pushed ahead quickly to wide-scale implementation. The governor's mandate specified the infrastructure be improved as soon as possible. Moving to PureDisk dovetailed with other IT efforts to replace antiquated legacy servers in the Department of Workforce Development and the state Department of Corrections. The replacement servers had been purchased without tape drives, since IOT officials knew they wanted to move away from that expensive and risky backup approach for the remote offices.

"We pushed forward quickly, partly because we were consolidating a bunch of remote infrastructures and wanted to do this at the same time," Rose says.

Jump ball, Indiana recovers

Now that PureDisk has been installed on most of the state's 300 remote servers, the results have borne out the pilot's success. IOT currently compresses more than 42 terabytes of data from the remote servers to just one terabyte-a factor of 98 percent, which is attributed primarily to the benefits of single-instance storage. And the success rate for backups has jumped from 50 percent to 95 percent.

The return on investment (ROI) for the project was two months, saving the state hundreds of thousands of dollars. IOT estimates the centralized backup will eventually save US$1-2 million in administrative and acquisition costs, while providing disaster recovery and business continuity.

IOT recently had an issue with a server that hadn't been transitioned exclusively to PureDisk and was still backing up to a faulty tape drive. PureDisk was the only way to recover the data, and 16 gigabytes of data were recovered over the WAN in just 12 hours-a recovery time that would have been unthinkable with the previous backup infrastructure.

"Using the figure of a two-month ROI is really a disservice to what we've gotten back from PureDisk," Rose says. "I can't say enough about how it's exceeded our goals and will allow us, in the future, to reduce a lot of cost in putting up new offices, replacing equipment, and supporting those offices for disaster recovery purposes."

Joe Mullich's work has appeared in Business Week and CIO magazines.