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California's Contra Costa County is one of the largest and fastest growing counties in the state. But, like local government agencies of all sizes, they faced a common IT problem—increasing demand for services and no increase in budgets. They needed to upgrade their IBM mainframe computing and mass storage capabilities, but new equipment seemed out of reach.
Because of budget limitations, the county looked seriously at one reseller's proposal to provide used equipment, a compromise at best. That's when Byron Williams, Jeskell's client manager, stepped in.
With some creative thinking, Williams showed the county how they could afford a new IBM zSeries mainframe with the latest features, plus an IBM Enterprise Storage Server (ESS "Shark") with 4X more storage than they had—and have the systems quickly pay for themselves.
First, since the software costs for the new IBM zSeries are much lower than on the old system, software savings alone could give the county a 4-year payback on the zSeries box. A further bonus was the availability of a second engine (the Integrated Facility for Linux or "IFL") on the new zSeries box. It has a single powerful processor dedicated to running a large Linux workload.
By running their Oracle database on the IFL engine, the county reduced database software license costs by 68%. The resultant savings were enough to pay for the new ESS unit. Extra budget help has come from opening up some of the increased storage space for other county operations.
Now, thanks to Jeskell's Williams, Contra Costa County has a new, advanced mainframe and a major increase in data storage and has still stayed in budget. In fact, Contra Costa's approach has become a model that is being seriously looked at by other counties.
