IBM today announced that Pierce County, one of the largest counties in Washington, has implemented an IBM systems infrastructure to support a new enterprise Geographic Information System (GIS) solution for the community's 700,000 residents and 35 agencies. The new technology consolidated infrastructure -- which will help increase the County's system capacity and lower the technology costs -- is designed to allow the County to provide its residents key information such as neighborhood crime statistics, resident polling locations, property tax research, and surveying reports, on demand. Pierce County's GIS department is responsible for designing and maintaining geographic data information for the entire county. Before undergoing the consolidation project, Pierce County was running its GIS software on HP and Sun Microsystems servers, connected to EMC storage. By teaming with IBM and Business Partner ESRI, Pierce County was able to create an information on demand infrastructure running ESRI mission critical applications that is anticipated to help save the County up to $3 million on technology and maintenance costs. Importantly, this systems consolidation includes a redundant database and system design to help support law enforcement and emergency management business continuity. "As with most government agencies, we were on a tight budget but we faced a major dilemma as demand for our services was growing, yet the infrastructure we had in place was not -- and we could not add servers, storage and people to solve the problem," said Linda Gerull, Pierce County's GIS Manager. "IBM helped us develop a consolidated systems architecture for our enterprise GIS that will achieve tremendous equipment and labor cost savings, increased capacity for many years and improved reliability." The IBM infrastructure is made up of an IBM TotalStorage Ultrium Scalable Tape Library connected to a 6 terabyte IBM TotalStorage DS4500 storage server that backs up various GIS applications. Four IBM eServer xSeries servers, which are critical for database serving and run ESRI ArcSDE and help with storage management, and four IBM eServer BladeCenter HS20s make up the infrastructure. The system runs ESRI ArcGIS 9.0 software products including, ArcIMS and ArcView. IBM Tivoli Storage Manager is being used for back-up. "Pierce County is a great example of why more businesses today are coming to IBM to help simplify their infrastructures. No other vendor can match IBM's breadth of products, our history of innovation, and our clear technology leadership," said Rich Lechner, Vice President of Storage Systems, IBM. Information on Demand The desire by businesses to access, manage and deliver information more efficiently is driving rapid change in the IT marketplace. Traditional low-tech, hardware-only approaches by proprietary vendors are meeting with resistance as companies grappling with new government mandates and business demands strive to capture and integrate information in a more seamless, real-time fashion across the enterprise. IBM's information on demand approach combines deep business insight with open standards, advanced storage systems, sophisticated systems management software and leading information management software to create efficient, cost effective and flexible information infrastructures. Regardless of industry, IBM helps companies transform data into insight to enable information on demand.