Durham County Upgrades Data Center Network with Cisco ACI to Speed New Services and Applications for County Residents, Businesses, and Employees

SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwired - Nov 29, 2016) -  Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced that Durham County Government of North Carolina has designed and implemented a new data center network fabric based on Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) as part of a long-range plan to create a highly efficient and automated application-centric data center. In phase one of the plan, all data center services will be migrated to the new ACI network, which is designed to provide greater visibility into the network fabric and the applications that run on it, ensuring that all applications and services will run at peak performance. 

With more than 280,000 residents in Durham County, the new Cisco ACI™ solution will allow the Information Services & Technology (IS&T) staff to quickly develop and deploy new digital services, and provide a strong technology foundation to support County facilities and services including public safety, health, social services, and administrative functions.

"With the deployment of Cisco ACI, Durham County will serve as a public sector model for a leading-edge Software Defined Network and an application centric data center," said Greg Marrow, CIO, Durham County. "This aligns with the County's goal for accountable, efficient and visionary government: streamlining our operations, saving energy and improving security for the services we provide residents and our business departments." 

Durham County Strategic Goals
The data center plan reflects the County's strategic goals and "managing for results" program which translates to specific objectives. Goals for the technology strategic plan include:

• Improve data security, business continuity and disaster recovery to ensure the availability of services, applications and data.
• Enhance development and implementation of new services and applications such as the new time-saving digital mobile app developed by IS&T department that allows residents to take a photo of a document and submit it via mobile phone. Apps such as this will be delivered more rapidly in the future.
• Move toward "green technology" that decreases environmental impact, lowers energy costs, and reduces operational costs.

To achieve these goals, the Enterprise Infrastructure and Operations Division is implementing a multi-phase plan to create a state-of-the-art data center with automated processes and enhanced security that will support a development and operations (DevOps) model for the rapid delivery of new services and applications.