DWR deploys hybrid cloud platform to support water conservation and management in California, US

California Department of Water Resources (DWR) has modified and activated its multi-tenant Tier III data centre based on hybrid cloud platform from Brocade and VMware to assist the drought-affected state’s residents and businesses.

The new IP technologies including Ethernet fabrics and virtualized compute and networking, enable faster deployment of cloud-based applications which support effective management and conservation programmes.

IT staff at DWR are using the technologies to deliver and maintain application across the agency’s departments which are used to support activities created for conservation and management of water use, including incentive programmes, data collection, reporting and analysis.

Technologies from Brocade and VMware have helped DWR in developing a self-service, private-cloud portal that automatically sets up network connectivity, security and other essential policies used by applications to access virtual machines running on servers and access data residing on storage arrays.

This portal has brought down the time required for installation of applications to as low as 15 minutes. Prior infrastructure service provisioning methods used to take days and weeks for the same kind of application deployment.

DWR chief information officer Tim Garza said: "Information technology has played a critical role in enabling California to develop and deliver solutions to help mitigate the impacts of the drought and to help residents and businesses meet the State’s goals for water use reduction.

"In addition to speeding up the deployment of applications and improving the effective use of compute resources used by DWR’s programme areas, our new self-service portal will soon be expanded to automate infrastructure provisioning for more than 30 other organisations within the California Natural Resources Agency."