City of Napa Continues Its Hybrid Cloud Journey with Microsoft and DataON

The City of Napa is the second largest city in California’s Napa Valley wine region, with about  80,000 residents. Located about an hour north of San Francisco, it’s a popular tourist destination known for its wineries, restaurants, and arts culture.

The Challenge: Provide Uninterrupted Service to Residents
 

The City of Napa’s department of information technology has a small team that manages services for about 500 employees and 17 departments. It also provides emergency services for the entire county of Napa. Like most state and local government agencies, it has limited resources and budget.

The City started its Microsoft hybrid cloud journey in 2015, when the department decided to move away from storage area network (SAN) technology and invest in software-defined storage from Microsoft. It was already using Microsoft Hyper-V and wanted to standardize on Microsoft technologies. The City chose DataON as the provider for its Microsoft software-defined storage system because of DataON’s Microsoft expertise and its reputation for providing outstanding support to its customers.

“When we were facing a significant service disruption in our 911 call center and emergency services, DataON loaned up a JBOD so we could maintain service,” said Owen Hershey, Systems Administrator, City of Napa. “This helped us avoid service disruption to our residents and proved DataON’s commitment to us as a customer.”

The City continued its journey in 2019 when it needed to refresh the infrastructure for its 911 call and dispatch centers, emergency services, and water and sewage systems. By now, Microsoft’s software-defined storage solution had grown into a full hyper-converged infrastructure solution in Azure Stack HCI.

“With Azure Stack HCI, it’s easy to spin up VMs. It doesn’t cost anything extra, and we can ensure our workloads have high performance”, Hershey said. “DataON provided a turnkey on-premises solution that just works. Their team goes above and beyond to support us.”

Growing with Azure Services

Five years later and it’s time for the City to refresh its infrastructure again. Azure Stack HCI has evolved beyond just hyper-converged infrastructure and Hershey and his team were looking at how to leverage new Azure hybrid technologies to help them do more with less.

The City updated its water and sewage cluster with a DataON Integrated System for Azure Stack HCI running the new Azure Stack HCI version 23H2. It also updated some of its older clusters to Azure Stack HCI 23H2.

Azure Stack HCI 23H2 opened the door for the City to be able to use many new Azure services.

• Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) for Azure Stack HCI for on-premises VDI – AVD lets organizations run virtualized desktop and apps on-premises at the edge or in their data center. For organizations with data residency requirements, latency-sensitive workloads, or those with data proximity requirements, AVD for Azure Stack HCI extends the capability of the Microsoft Cloud to their data center.
• Azure Site Recovery for native disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) – Keep your organization up and running during planned and unplanned outages. Deploy replication, failover, and recovery processes through Site Recovery
• Azure Arc — Extends management and services to any infrastructure, whether on-premises, multi-cloud, or at the edge. It enables organizations to deploy Azure services, including its VMs, anywhere. It provides a unified approach to managing its IT assets, enhancing operational efficiency, and ensuring compliance with organizational policies. 
• Azure Landing Zones – Helps you run workloads in Azure on on-premises – DataON can help create a pre-configured environment in Microsoft Azure to provide a secure and scalable foundation for cloud workloads. It follows best practices and design principles to help efficiently manage and deploy applications in the cloud.

We Can Count on DataON To Help Us Grow with Azure

The support that DataON has provided us over the years is unparalleled”, said Hershey. “Small IT departments like us are always busy working on many projects. If we have a hardware or Microsoft problem we can’t immediately solve, we can call the DataON support team and get a quick answer.”

“Because of our close relationship with DataON, it’s given us the confidence to look at adopting new Azure technologies because we know DataON will support us as we grow.”

About DataON

DataON is a hybrid cloud computing company that exclusively leverages Microsoft technologies to build hybrid cloud solutions that help companies and organizations achieve more with less. Our solutions utilize Azure Stack HCI for on-premises compute and storage and are designed so you can implement Azure hybrid cloud services such as Azure Arc, Azure Virtual Desktop, Azure Kubernetes Service, Arc-enabled data services, and more. Our Microsoft expertise and white glove service & support is the DataON difference.

DataON has deployed over 1500 HCI clusters with 1000 enterprise customers. Our enterprise-level solutions, delivered as a complete, turnkey experience, are designed to provide the highest level of performance, manageability, and security offered. DataON is a Microsoft Gold Partner, Microsoft Cloud Service Provider (CSP), and an Intel Platinum Partner.