Case Study

Metropolitan Police Agency Assures Services During Data Center Transformation with NETSCOUT

Metropolitan Police Agency Assures Services During Data Center Transformation with NETSCOUT

Highlights

The Challenge
  • Data center upgrade and consolidation with new Cisco® ACI SDN architecture
  • Critical law enforcement application performance requirements
  • Before-and-after workload visibility and performance monitoring requirements
The Solution
  • nGeniusONE® Service Assurance platform with UC smart analytics
  • InfiniStreamNG™ appliance
  • nGenius® 5000 series packet flow switch
The Results
  • Assured service quality during data center migration
  • Improved police application deployment time assured by NETSCOUT®
  • Reduced IT spend through data center and vendor technology consolidations

Customer Profile

This metropolitan police agency ensures the safety of millions of local residents and annual visitors.

The agency has improved overall police business efficiency by embracing innovative digital technology at nearly every operational level, ranging from the back office to police vehicles patrolling local streets.

Police officers and civilian employees use more than 100 production-level information systems in conducting daily business.

The Challenge

Network and application performance delays are unacceptable in any enterprise environment. For police officers on the front lines, however, performance anomalies in the radio network or crucial laptop law enforcement applications can truly translate to life-and-death matters.

The agency uses NETSCOUT’s nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform to continuously monitor high-speed fiber connections running from data centers to the city’s police stations. nGeniusONE also assures availability for mission-critical police services, including General Packet Radio Service mobile data, Voice over IP communications, police databases, and even applications used by officers to run DMV and warrant checks from their laptops.

The agency’s Network Operations team made the strategic decision to take advantage of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) software-defined networking (SDN) solution to simplify their future data center operations. This solution enables the agency to support a new generation of distributed applications over existing physical and virtualized environments. Simultaneously, they planned to consolidate data center operations.

As part of the network design phase coordinated months prior to the data center rollout, Network Operations identified an ACI SDN solution incorporating Cisco “spine-and-leaf” topology. This design met the Network Operations team’s objective for a more agile and expansive network offering reduced network latency for officers and employees.

Factoring both the city’s financial investment and importance of this project toward improving police efficiency and public safety, the agency knew the initiative would not succeed without the visibility necessary to assure both new and existing data center operations during the ACI SDN technology transformation.

Solution in Action

When it came time to finalize their data center design, the agency relied on recommended practices and next-generation service assurance technology provided by long-term partner NETSCOUT.

With the agency taking a phased project implementation approach, they selected a service assurance solution based on the InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) appliance family and nGenius 5000 series packet flow switch (PFS) technology. The agency is using NETSCOUT smart data for nGeniusONE smart analytics, providing a cost-effective monitoring solution to assure the ACI data center project before, during, and after migration.

In consolidating two data center operations into the new facility, the agency can use NETSCOUT to establish service reliability and responsiveness baselines and migrate applications, compute, network, and storage workloads with confidence. nGeniusONE smart analytics quickly detect and resolve application and service performance problems without requiring modifications to existing workflows.

The NETSCOUT solution provides pervasive end-to-end visibility and deep analytics into the ACI SDN and software-defined data centers. With ISNG, the agency can view the entire service stack, including applications, networks, compute, and databases, and all their interdependencies, including physical or virtual and on- or off-premises

The PFS 5000 supports high performance in the ACI SDN environment by monitoring both logical and physical connections. In addition, this NETSCOUT packet broker solution complements the Cisco spine-and-leaf design’s scalability, reliability, and high performance by load balancing traffic flow in the data center, as well as dynamically managing packet forwarding at scale.

The Results

The agency is realizing the full benefits of ACI SDN technology in their new data center by using NETSCOUT smart data and smart analytics to minimize associated implementation risks.

With the NETSCOUT solution assuring the data center performance, the agency can leverage their ACI SDN technology to more quickly deploy applications and introduce new services at lower costs.

The agency’s use of the NETSCOUT solution enhances long-term IT efficiencies by providing superior network monitoring and application performance management. With NETSCOUT, the agency improves overall police services delivery capabilities to citizens, while reducing operating expenses linked to streamlined infrastructure overhead.

The agency is realizing further cost savings by standardizing on NETSCOUT PFS technology for all future IT projects. With the ongoing performance provided by the PFS 5000 and already-deployed PFS 3900, the agency is taking advantage of development and integration capabilities, which makes vendor management easier, more seamless, and cost-effective.

Most importantly, NETSCOUT’s next-generation solution helps assure high performance of the agency’s network and application suite, which improves police and public safety and enhances service delivery to residents and visitors.