vRealize Network Insight – California Department of Water Case Study

California Department of Water’s IT Infrastructure and Operations has leveraged several industry standard technologies and tooling to maintain and operate their data center. Many of these tools were built for individual silos of compute, network and security.

First of all, during the design phase of their new Cloud 3.0 project, it became clear that along with the infrastructure elements, visibility and operations would be important elements to consider. Not only would these elements need to be integrated in from the beginning of the process, but as infrastructure was virtualized across compute, network and security, they would need to move away from point tools that could only provide insights into a particular area (compute, network, security etc). Instead, a converged platform that connected these elements together while providing visibility and analytics across multi-vendor, virtual, physical elements would become necessary. While evaluating their existing tools, CDWR was quick to identify that this gap was prevalent among other existing technologies in the marketplace.

Secondly, a big part of CDWR’s goal was to knock down silos and increase  IT agility with a modern architecture that could support up to 5,500 virtual servers, 11 petabytes of data storage, 2,600 applications and 1,254-networked sites.

“Our goal at California Department of Water was to achieve and maintain the highest level of overall data center economics and performance, and the architecture we put in place went a long way in helping achieve these goals. ” says Tony Morshed, CTO at California Department of Water.

Having used VMware for server virtualization, the decision to go with VMware NSX was straightforward.

Finally, by baking vRealize Network Insight into the project from the beginning, CDWR have been able to actively troubleshoot along the way, which has been an invaluable timesaver to their personnel.

Additionally, because vRealize Network Insight is tightly integrated with VMware, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Brocade and F5 technologies, it has been relatively easy for CDWR to move to the software-defined data center (SDDC).