Inyo County

Country: United States Of America
Industry: Government
Solution: Digital Age Networking

Inyo County, located in Eastern California, is the state’s 2nd largest county in land area at 10,000 sq mls, and claims the highest and lowest elevation in the contiguous United States: Mt. Whitney and Death Valley. With 450 employees, 24 departments – including administration, property tax collection and law enforcement – spread across 13 locations and 15 satellite offices, the focus for Inyo County’s Information Technology team is reliable connectivity.

We continue to invest in Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise switches. They meet our requirements and are most cost effective. Their performance helps us keep up with technology evolution.

Michael Baffrey, Sr. Programmer Analyst, Inyo County

Challenges

When a network spans 10,000 sq mls, a limited IT staff creates a challenge. Inyo needed a network that was easier to manage, adaptable to deal with more extreme weather and natural disasters, and flexible to handle expanding traffic.

Action

Inyo County built a reliable, performance focused, fast network to support employees and services. They expanded bandwidth and speeds between buildings and to the desktop. Power over Ethernet (PoE) supported transition to a Voice over IP (VoIP) phone network. The Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) protocol eased network configuration and traffic flow, and centralising network management achieved reliable and stable connectivity.

Inyo’s environmental and geographic conditions require redundancy to maintain uptime, according to Michael Baffrey, Sr. Programmer Analyst at Inyo County. “A fibre uplink at one of our facilities was accidentally knocked offline,” Baffrey shared. “With the immediate and automatic re-routing of SPB, service remained online, and nobody knew there was an issue. It wasn’t discovered until a day later during routine maintenance. We’ve since added email alerts.” More redundant links are planned between locations, and the auto-configuration technology in the switches will handle setup and connectivity. The county plans to roll out more Wi-Fi at offices and continue to increase capacity across the service area.

Results

Technical benefits

OmniSwitch products in core to edge provide 10 times capacity: 1G to workstations, 10G between buildings and 100G at the core
OmniVista provides ease of configuration from install through updates
Shortest Path Bridging benefits span ease of set up, redundancy and performance, minimise need for VLAN management
Ruggedised Layer 3 managed, hardened switch operates in County’s harsh environments and extreme temperatures
VoIP deployed; PoE connects phones easily to the VoIP network

Financial benefits

Recent ALE solution upgrades met all networking and support requirements, while coming in at a lower cost than the competition, saving as much as 35% on switching and 400% on services over some competitors