Brookline Police Department Calls in Marathon Technologies for Backup
THE COMPANY
Bordered by the City of Boston, Brookline is populated with more than 58,000 residents, but with daily commuters to the area colleges, corporate offices and hospitals, the population can increase to more than 100,000. To serve the active community, the Brookline Police Department (BPD) is comprised of 145 sworn officers including a full time dispatch staff who are responsible for handling all calls for police, fire and ambulance services.
THE SITUATION
To ensure the safety of the town's residents, the police department requires 24/7 availability of their mission-critical public safety computer applications including computer-assisted dispatch (CAD), arrest booking program, detective case management and records management system for accident reporting.
The department relies on its computer-assisted dispatch (CAD) and Enhanced 9-1-1 Interface-to-CAD applications to coordinate all dispatch for police, fire, and emergency medical services. "From our dispatch to our arrest/booking system, downtime is unacceptable. If our public safety systems go down, it not only jeopardizes the procedural and legal requirements for our standard reports, but more importantly, it puts the lives our officers and the community at risk," stated Officer Scott Wilder, director of technology for the BPD. "Any downtime would disrupt communications and deprive our officers of the critical information that aids them in their duties."
For years the BPD used a secondary server as backup when the main server was down that required a manual start up and switch over to the backup server. In the event of a main server failure, the IT department would need hours to be fully operational. During the downtime, officers would have to revert to a less efficient manual dispatch system, losing access to key programs, systems and records.
THE SOLUTION
To help meet the BPD's 24-hour high availability requirements, technology partner Larimore recommended Marathon Technologies' everRun® software-based system.
"After reviewing other high availability solutions, we found that only Marathon delivered the goods we needed at a price five to six times less than the other products on the market," said Officer Wilder.
The BPD chose Marathon's everRun software, running on standard Intel-based Dell servers, to guarantee that its critical applications would be available and operational at all times. The BPD purchased, installed, and configured the everRun software quickly and easily.
The everRun software works by pooling the physical resources of two Dell servers into a single operating environment. everRun virtualizes these two servers to appear and operate as one for the purpose of ensuring high availability for their critical applications. If one server stops running due to any failure, the dispatch system and other public safety applications continue to operate uninterrupted on the other server.
THE RESULTS
For more than eight years, the BPD has been using Marathon's everRun software to ensure continuous uptime for its critical public safety applications. Since implementing everRun, the police department has maintained the highest level of availability in spite of a significant hardware failure.
"I reflect every holiday season, and I am grateful for using everRun to protect our critical applications. On one occasion, our server went down on Christmas day, but thanks to everRun, we never experienced a disruption in service. The failure was completely transparent to users and most importantly, I didn't have to spend Christmas at the office trying to get our systems back up and running," said Officer Wilder. "We have found everRun to be the piece in our data center that was missing. With Marathon, we are confident that our police, fire and EMS teams have continuous access to the applications they need to respond to emergencies."
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