Case Study

The Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office (JCDAO) prosecutes more than 3,000 felonies per year. Located in Golden, Colorado, JCDAO employs approximately 200 people, including 60 attorneys. As one of Colorado’s most populous jurisdictions, Jefferson County has a census of approximately 545,000 residents. Confronted with a significant amount of electronic data growth and an aging optical system, JCDAO realized it needed an updated, reliable data archive solution with a long-term roadmap. It found that solution with the Imation InfiniVault Active Archive Storage Appliance.

The SituationThe primary storage at JCDAO is centered on the IBM AS/400, which serves as the storage area network (SAN) for its Windows environment. The AS/400 is integrated with a blade server rack and there are six Windows servers—four in the blade center and two external servers for power balancing. A Plasmon optical system was used to archive all historical image documents.

JCDAO was in the process of re-facing its legacy system from the AS/400 green screen to a web-based solution. Most of the images generated by JCDAO are “discovery” documents, consisting of police reports and documents used in prosecution that must be provided to defendants and their council. The discovery documents are scanned and supplied to the defense in either paper form or on CD, with plans to provide them electronically via the Internet.

The Challenge In 2010, JCDAO generated approximately two million pages of images and is experiencing a data growth rate of ten percent yearly. The large amount of discovery data and continued data growth dictated that JCDAO modernize its storage infrastructure. It needed to retire the Plasmon optical system and migrate the images onto more reliable equipment with a long-term technological roadmap and capability to handle the increase in data.

JCDAO also needed to implement automated storage for its discoverable documents—digital photographs, video recordings of interviews, 911 and radio dispatch audio recordings, Power Point presentations used during trial, etc. Since this type of data consumed a considerable amount of space on the optical system, it was stored offline on CDs and DVDs, creating an extremely cumbersome process that proved difficult to track. In addition, the optical system was slow, taking 10-12 seconds to open a document associated with a closed

Imation InfiniVault™ Active Archive Storage Appliance Proves Faster Data Retrieval for District Attorney’s Office

AT-A-GLANCE

Industry:County Government

Application: Long-term Data Archive

Backup and Replication

Primary Storage Offload

Optical Replacement

Software: IBM Content Manager

Benefits Realized: Quick information retrieval; reduced backup time by offloading static data from primary storage; reliable, long-term storage and data archive.

Imation Enterprises Corp., 1 Imation Way, Oakdale, MN 55128.3414 USA Ph: 651.704.4000 Fax: 651.537.4675 www.imation.com © Imation Corp. Imation, the Imation logo and InfiniVault are trademarks of Imation Corp and its affiliates. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. (03.05.12)

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case—a virtual lifetime when you are sitting in court. JCDAO needed a storage solution that was easily expandable, provided improved performance and faster data retrieval.

The SolutionJCDAO migrated the historical documents off the optical system and onto the Imation InfiniVault. It also removed the active case documents from its high-cost storage and placed them onto the InfiniVault. The InfiniVault integrated easily and seamlessly with the existing environment and is now totally dedicated to all the imaging files— both active and inactive.

Access time to archived documents dramatically decreased. “We wanted to improve performance and the InfiniVault has given us that. I don’t think we wait more than 2-3 seconds, at the very most, to open an archive document,” says Steve Lockwood, IT Director.

While JCDAO continues to run daily backups and physically remove them to an offsite location, it has plans to purchase an additional InfiniVault to employ more efficient replication procedures. By using the replication capability of the InfiniVault, the data can be cloned to the second InfiniVault located at a secure off-site location and the manual process of removing the backups eliminated. JCDAO also plans to move the daily “working” documents—static data that is rarely used but needs to be retained—from its current location on the primary storage to an InfiniVault solution. In this way, JCDAO will free a sizeable amount of valuable disk storage space and realize a significant decrease in backup time.

Lockwood says that he would recommend the Imation InfiniVault without hesitation. “As far as another solution that integrates as well for the AS/400 environment, we didn’t need to look any farther than the InfiniVault.” He added, “I was very happy to get rid of the Plasmon, and even happier to get to a solution where I could move both active and inactive images offline. That made a huge improvement over outputs.”

Questions? Contact us at:Phone: 651-704-7777Website: www.scalablestorage.com

“ I was very happy to get rid of the Plasmon, and even happier to get to a solution where I could move both active and inactive images offline. That made a huge improvement over outputs.

”—Steve Lockwood

IT Director, Jefferson County DA's Office