BOONE COUNTY CASE STUDY

Alacritech Boosts GIS Mapping Application Performance for a Missouri County without Costly Equipment Upgrade

• Industry/Market:
  » Government
  
• Challenge:
  » Allow county officials and residents to access thousands of GIS maps more easily through a self-service Web application to reduce walk-up and phone-in mapping requests at various county offices
  » Improve application performance and availability of GIS mapping software
  » Scale the application to support an additional 1 TBs of 6-inch resolution color orthophoto images without degrading performance
  » Support growing application traffic without a major server, network or storage upgrade
  
• Solution:
  » Alacritech Scalable Network Accelerators (SES2002XT)
  
• Key Benefits:
  » County officials and residents have reliable fingertip access to seamless maps and aerial photos of Boone County through an intuitive Web portal
  » Users have reported a noticeable improvement in map refresh rates and are happy with the self-service
  » I/O performance testing indicates that the network accelerator doubled throughput. Requests that previously took five seconds, now take two
  » Reliance on phone-in requests and walk-up traffic have gone down, freeing county staff to focus on other projects
  » Dual-ports provide built-in redundancy for optimal availability of the GIS mapping applications

Business Profile:
Boone County in central Missouri is home to 135,000 residents.

Boone County in central Missouri provides GIS mapping and aerial photography viewers to hundreds of county employees and tens of thousands of residents, providing valuable GIS information used by home owners, architects, contractors, hunters and hikers as well as mortgage companies and banks. The map viewers, provided free of charge to residents and local businesses, contain data ranging from traffic, zoning and geologic information to registered offender lists and voting districts.

Jason Warzinik, GIS Program Manager for the county, estimates that more than 150,000 map viewers requests are processed each month, which in the past would have placed a major burden on various county departments that would have had to handle the map requests manually. The GIS mapping service also plays havoc on the county’s GIS systems, taking up nearly 2 TBs of storage capacity — 98 percent of which are high-quality parcel maps and aerial photographs.

To meet demand, Warzinik deployed two GIS mapping applications: ESRI ArcMap for county officials to access on their desktops and ESRI ArcIMS/ArcGIS Server, Web-based applications that gives county residents and businesses access to maps over the Internet. However, before the applications were rolled out, Warzinik wanted to make sure that performance wouldn’t be an inhibitor to users leveraging the self-service. Otherwise, the county’s investment in the software wouldn’t be very effective, and phone-in and walk-up requests would continue to hamper county officials.

“Performance was really weighing heavily on our minds as we deployed the new applications,” Warzinik said. “It was really important that people actually used the software, and if it took more than five or ten seconds to pull up a map, they probably wouldn’t use it. It was important that we got this right the first time.”

Taking TCP Processing Burden off the Server
In an effort to increase performance of the GIS mapping applications, Boone County deployed Alacritech Scalable Network Accelerators in its GIS database server, ensuring that residents and county officials have reliable and quick fingertip access to maps and aerial photographs. The network accelerator is deployed directly in the database server, taking the TCP processing burden off of the processor and placing it on the network card. Warzinik estimates that by allowing the server to focus exclusively on application processing and data serving, the Alacritech Scalable Network Accelerator has improved throughout by 50 percent—shortening average map generating time from five seconds to two.

“I’ve done some I/O meter performance testing and have seen throughput double,” Warzinik said. “But most importantly, users noticed a notable performance increase in map refresh rates once the new Alacritech card was installed. And that means that they are likely to continue to use the online service.”

According to Warzinik, installing an Alacritech Scalable Network Accelerator in the county’s HP ProLiant DL360 Servers is very easy, requiring him to simply shut down the server, swap out the old Host Bus Adapter (HBA) with the new scalable network accelerator from Alacritech and reboot. The only configuration required was to team the dual ports—the old HBA model was a single port configuration—and add the SAN LUN in the iSCSI initiator. The SQL database data drive showed up automatically in Windows, and the SQL service started back up without an issue. The Alacritech dual-port design builds redundancy right into the system, improving availability of the application and the data.

“The Alacritech network accelerator gives the server a performance boost, ensuring that GIS mapping requests are executed quickly and efficiently without requiring a costly equipment upgrade.”
    Jason Warzinik, GIS Program Manager, Boone County, Missouri

Enhanced Application Performance
As a result of the performance increase, users are able to load each map in several seconds, ensuring that the GIS mapping applications are more convenient than phone-in or walk-up requests. Instead, users are able to access the maps from anywhere with an Internet connection, making GIS data more available to those who need it. County employees are able to log in to the desktop application from their desks.

The central repository also reduces the number of county departments that have to “touch” each map, putting collection, archive and accessibility responsibility on the GIS program manager. Before, each county department was responsible for their own hardcopy maps—much of them redundant with other departments. Now a single group can manage the service, standardizing how the maps are generated, backed up and disseminated to the public. This takes a time-consuming, manual process out of the hands of the individual departments, allowing staff to focus on other projects.

In addition, the county has been able to add thousands of new 6-inch resolution color orthophoto images—totaling more than 1 TB of data—without having to upgrade the database server equipment, network infrastructure or storage performance. Typically, organizations have to increase processing power when storage capacity is scaled to that degree, however, the performance savings from the Alacritech network accelerators eliminated the need for a major upgrade.

“The Alacritech network accelerator gives the server a performance boost, ensuring that the GIS mapping requests are executed quickly and efficiently without requiring a costly equipment upgrade,” Warzinik said.

System Configuration: