IT staff for the government of Clark County, Nevada, which contains the city of Las Vegas, have embarked on a major server consolidation project in an attempt to tackle data center space constraints and deal with the burgeoning storage needs of one of America's fastest-growing cities.
Rich Taylor, the County's senior systems programmer, told Byte and Switch that the county faces a unique data challenge. "Conservatively, the population is growing by 4,000 to 5,000 people a month," he says. There are now around two million people living in the local area, up from less than half a million in 1980.
Last year, the U.S. Census Bureau identified North Las Vegas as the third fastest-growing city in the nation, with a population boom of almost 10 percent between 2003 and 2004.
Understandably, this population influx has had a significant impact on the county's storage requirements. "We have a difficult time keeping up with the growth," explains Taylor. "Five years ago we bought an [IBM] Shark with 1.3 Tbytes and we thought that would last us." Now, however, the organization's storage needs are "sneaking up" to the 100-Tbyte mark.
The county's storage is provided by an array of devices, including the IBM Shark as well as a DMX-3, two EMC Clariions, and a Centera device, all from EMC. Last year, the county also added an EMC Celerra 704G NAS device in an attempt to control its server footprint.
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