Jason Foster is an IT Manager at the Center for Advanced Public Safety at the University of Alabama. The Center for Advanced Public Safety (CAPS) originally developed a software that provided crash reporting and data analytics software for the State of Alabama. Today, CAPS specializes in custom software mostly in the realm of law enforcement and public safety. They have created systems for many states and government agencies across the country.

Bryan Salek, Networking and Security Staff Systems Engineer, spoke with Jason about network virtualization and what led the Center for Advanced Public Safety to choosing VMware NSX Data Center and what the future holds for their IT transformation.

 

The Need for Secure and Resilient Infrastructure

As part of a large modernize data center initiative, the forward-thinking CAPS IT team began to investigate micro-segmentation. Security is a primary focus at CAPS due to the fact that the organization develops large software packages for various state agencies. The applications that CAPS writes and builds are hosted together, but contain confidential information and need to be segmented from one another.

Once CAPS rolled out the micro-segmentation use-case, the IT team decided to leverage NSX Data Center for disaster recovery purposes as well. With networking and security set up across two data centers, it is essential that CAPS operates with maximum performance, security, and resilience for the state infrastructure agencies they support.

 

Consistent Networking and Security Across Two Sites with Cross-vCenter NSX

Cross-vCenter NSX provides the ability to manage the NSX environment across multiple vCenter domains in a centralized manner. In Cross-VC NSX, logical networks are stretched across sites, providing consistent networking and security across vCenter domains or sites.

One of the advantages of Cross-vCenter NSX is increased mobility of workloads – VMs can be migrated using vMotion across vCenters without reconfiguring the VM or changing firewall rules. Applications can be restarted at the recovery site upon a DR event while maintaining their IP addresses – no need to re-IP. Enforcement of the applications is maintained due to the universal nature of the distributed firewall and security policies. This means there is no need to perform manual mapping as all networking and security services are synchronized across sites, providing huge benefits for highly dynamic environments.

 

Listen to the podcast to learn more about what Jason’s team at the Center for Advanced Public Safety is up to. Then, check out Humair Ahmed’s VMware NSX Multi-site Solutions and Cross-vCenter NSX Design Day 1 Guide to learn more about the Cross-VC NSX solution.

 

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