Cook County Assessor’s Office Server Virtualization

Implementing a Back-Up Server to Ensure Business Continuity

Cook County is the second-largest county in the U.S. and home to more than 40% of all the residents in Illinois. The Cook County Assessor’s Office is responsible for setting fair and accurate values for 1.8 million parcels of Cook County property. In addition, the Accessor’s Office works with other government agencies to stimulate economic development, job creation, and the construction of affordable housing as well as helps county residents better understand the assessment process and take advantage of money-saving exemptions.

The Assessor’s Office hired Level-1 to design, configure and implement a Hyper-V environment on Dell PowerEdge VRTX, replicate a webserver and provide threat management services for Exchange DAG. Hyper-V Replica allows the client in the event of a failure at a primary site (e.g. fire, power outage, or server failure) to fail over their production workloads to Replica servers at a secondary location with minimal downtime.

Level-1’s solution has the option to restore virtualized workloads to a point in time, depending on the recovery history selections for the virtual machine. The process included creating a consolidated, secure email exchange server. The TMG provides virtual firewall security and the forefront protection product provides an exchange mail anti-virus. The Hyper-V Replica provides a failsafe disaster recovery solution for the Sheriff’s web server. Implementation of the Hyper-V Replica solution for the web server (i.e. Hyper-V server) provides asynchronous replication of Hyper-V virtual web server between the primary and secondary web servers as well as continuity for virtualized environments, preventing suspension of operations due to either planned events (e.g. hardware maintenance) or unplanned events (e.g. local disaster or hardware failure).

 
 

Location

Chicago

Markets

Government

Services

Technical Services