Downtime in the Desert

Six hours after the e-mail system went down, Derek Kruger fielded his 39th anxious caller. "When will my e-mail be up again?" As IT and communication supervisor for the city of Safford, Ariz., Kruger is responsible for the networking and telephony systems for all city government departments. The Microsoft

Safford, a town of nearly 8,950 residents located 130 miles northeast of Tucson, serves as the Graham County seat of government. Its city government is spread among 10 buildings, including City Hall, fire and police departments, library, facilities yard, landfill, golf course, city attorneys and the Boys & Girls Club of Safford. Kruger and his team of two engineers and a help-desk administrator support 250 network and telephony users, radios for public utilities and public safety, as well as city-issued cell phones for a majority of the city staff.

The city government was supported by a metro area network (MAN) comprised of 180 PCs, five Dell servers, several disk-based RAID systems and an aging tape system. Kruger and his team had worked over the past three years to connect the city buildings, linking eight buildings with fiber-optic cable and one with a wireless connection.

Continuous availability, data protection and backup presented a challenge to Kruger and his team. Network users saved their files to a server, which was backed up to tape. "By nature, the employees we serve generate a lot of files, many of which need to be held onto for a fairly long period of time for legal or compliance purposes," he explains.

Additionally, the city's servers included a Microsoft Exchange e-mail system and SQL Servers, as well as financial and accounting software. The tape system could no longer keep up with the volume of data to be backed up. The IT team had to back up the Exchange server one night and the file servers over the next two nights. This practice left gaps in data protection and took all night to complete.

The tape systems' limited capacity only allowed for archival of two days' of data, thus inhibiting the networking team's ability to retrieve historical data. "Our limited capacity put us at risk," says Kruger. "If one of the city employees needed to retrieve old documents or e-mails, we might not have been able to obtain them."