City of Palmdale Transitions to Microsoft Hybrid Cloud with DataON

The City of Palmdale is known as the “Aerospace Capital of America,” being the home for the Air Force Test Center and NASA’s Flight Research Center. Located in the northern part of Los Angeles County, it’s the 3rd most populous city in California, with a population of about 170,000 residents. The City’s small IT team supports about 300 employees.

Modernizing On-Premises IT with an Eye Towards Hybrid Cloud

The City of Palmdale recently adopted Microsoft Azure Stack HCI for on-premises hyper-converged infrastructure to replace its aging VMware solution. Azure Stack HCI combines on-premises infrastructure with Azure cloud services, allowing the city to run virtualized workloads on a cluster of servers. It seamlessly integrates with Azure for backup, disaster recovery, cloud-based management, and more.

The City had some challenges getting its cluster up and running and transitioning its virtual machines (VMs) to Azure Stack HCI so it looked to DataON to help them get started. It chose DataON because they are an exclusive Microsoft partner and specialize in solutions and deployments for state and local government agencies.

After DataON helped the City install its Azure Stack HCI infrastructure, it helped them to backup, recover and migrate VMs to the new Azure Stack HCI cluster and ensure they work smoothly in the new environment.

To prepare the City for cloud adoption, DataON created Azure Landing Zones for file shares, SQL Platform as a Service (PaaS) applications, security, and disaster recovery. Landing zones help you plan and design an Azure deployment, hosting the workloads that you plan to build in or migrate to the cloud. It’s a prescriptive model for managing workload portfolios at scale, and consistency and governance across workload teams.

As a newer Microsoft feature, many organizations don’t know how to employ and configure Azure Landing Zones, which is where DataON’s Microsoft expertise can help, ensuring the environments are properly configured, provisioned, secured, and optimized for each application, reducing the learning curve and troubleshooting.

Next Steps in the Hybrid Cloud Journey

DataON is working with the City to implement Microsoft Intune to set up Microsoft Entra hybrid-joined devices. This will provide a seamless and secure management experience for hybrid environments, including features such as device enrollment and management, policy and compliance, single sign-on capabilities, and conditional access.

Additionally, DataON will help the City move its Active Directory (AD) completely to Azure AD for domain services. Once each of these steps are in place, the City can go live at a moment’s notice because each VM, Azure Landing Zone, application, and database will have been tested and troubleshooted well in advance.

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.