Nestled between two of Wisconsin’s largest metropolitan areas is Jefferson County, a mostly rural enclave of some 90,000 people that is experiencing “big city” growth with population soaring due to its desirable location between Madison and Milwaukee. To keep pace with ongoing expansion while providing approximately 840 employees with the latest technology tools and services, Jefferson County’s nine-person IT department maintains two data centers with 33 file servers and two AS/400 computer systems. A 23-mile, fully redundant fiber-optic network backbone links 11 county buildings encompassing 650 desktops and about 100 notebook computers.
According to Roland Welsch, IT manager for Jefferson County, the department has standardized on leading-edge solutions from top-tier providers, including Cisco and Microsoft, as part of an overarching philosophy to deploy market-leading products. “Cisco plays a major role in ensuring a highly available, redundant network foundation with a full assortment of switches, routers, IP telephony and security solutions,” he explained. “Implementing Cisco gear gives us the best opportunity to deliver the highest quality in voice, video and data networking services.”
The Challenge:
In 2003, Jefferson County installed state-of-the-art Cisco equipment, including Catalyst Series 6500 and 3500 switches, 2600 Series routers as well as Cisco CallManager, 7900 Series unified IP phones, Unity voice mail and Security Access Control Server wireless access points. At the time, Jefferson County also invested heavily in Cisco’s SMARTnet support and maintenance offering to ensure the delivery of timely, regular software updates, fast response to technical questions and expedited equipment replacement in the event of catastrophic failures.
Jefferson County made this substantial investment upfront with the expectation of achieving a seven-year lifespan with its core routers and switches. As some of the devices got older, however, higher failure rates became common; at the same time, the IT staff found it was increasingly difficult to obtain identical replacements for the equipment from the manufacturer. “Some pieces were only available if I bought the latest generation,” Welsch added. “I didn’t want to do this for several reasons — the cost exceeded my budget and the new generation equipment brought interoperability challenges as well as required us to learn a new version of IOS.”
