Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center

To protect the community and serve up data

The Montgomery, Ala.-based ACJIC runs the AlaCop.gov secure Web portal and a data clearinghouse serving 864 agencies and 12,508 law enforcement and criminal-justice officers across the state. ACJIC replaced its mainframe with three Unisys ES7000 enterprise servers, plus Unisys' Safeguard 30m for real-time failover, to improve its disaster-recovery and data-warehousing capabilities.

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The system, which went live in February at a cost of $640,000, gives criminal-justice employees improved real-time access to criminal databases, as well as other data, such as officer contact information and current caseloads. This access streamlines casework and reduces the risks to officers. In addition, it provides real-time disaster-recovery capabilities, a feature ACJIC is offering to other agencies across the state. "The folks who went through [Hurricane] Katrina really appreciate the importance of a real-time disaster-recovery site," says Bob Buel, chief network engineer at ACJIC. "A truly hot site is the holy grail of IT operations, and that's what we have now."

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida

Automation: a data center prescription

BCBS of Florida, a Jacksonville-based health insurer with more than 8,500 employees statewide, was having trouble managing and maintaining the 1,200 physical servers and 450 virtual machines in various flavors of Windows, Linux and AIX in its $40 million data center. Intending to automate its highly manual and time-intensive process of provisioning storage and server resources, the firm decided to augment its BladeLogic Operations Manager software for server management with BladeLogic's Orchestration Manager, which provides adapters to integrate the firm's 10 management products across the data center. 

The result was that the BCBS team could provision new servers in two hours vs. the two weeks it had taken previously. "Now we can automate from the point of procuring something from the vendor to installation, without manual effort, except for physically plugging it into our network," says Paul Stallings, senior manager for provisioning systems at the insurer.