Potomac Information Systems provides the server, storage, and networking products for your IT infrastructure and data lifecycle management. Our specialists can guide you to match the right technology to your business requirements.
We offer a “best of breed” technology portfolio of the leading manufacturers such as Dell, HP, EMC, Data Domain, StorageTek, Unisys, Brocade, Emulex, Cisco, and Riverbed, from one single source.
SERVER PLATFORMS
STORAGE PLATFORMS
SERVER PLATFORMS
From rack, tower, blade, and infrastructure platforms our servers can simplify management and accelerate workloads. These server platforms leverage industry leading technology such as Intel Xeon® processors, Microsoft Windows® and Linux operating systems, and virtualization technologies including VMware™ and Microsoft Hyper-V. Our portfolio of servers include Dell, HP, and Unisys offering peak performance, versatile configurations, and embedded management.
STORAGE PLATFORMS
Offering the best in disk technology from the leading manufacturers such as Dell, EMC, and HP these storage platforms offer a hybrid of array products including SAS, NL (Near-Line) SAS, SATA, and cache disk drives to support your virtual pool storage requirements.
STORAGE VIRTUALIZATION
DISASTER RECOVERY AND BACK-UP
STORAGE VIRTUALIZATION
Storage virtualization leverages different technologies to help you reduce costs and improve utilization of your assets.
DISASTER RECOVERY AND BACK-UP
From faster back-ups to remote replication for on demand recovery, our solutions include, tape libraries, virtual tape libraries, and replication software solutions. Our team of specialists can help you architect a data back-up and recovery solution to both fit your business needs as well as budget.
Case Studies
Client
Business Challenge
Solution
Client
Department of Legislative Services and the Maryland General Assembly
EMC VNX and Fully Automated Storage Tiered for Virtual Pools Fast VP
The Office of Information Systems (OIS) is the primary technology support group for the Department of Legislative Services (DLS) and the Maryland General Assembly (MGA). The services of OIS include design, development, maintenance, and support of custom legislative systems such as legislative bill drafting, bill status, and chamber automation. OIS supports about 1200 personal computers in the Annapolis complex and operates a legislative data center including Windows Servers hosting Exchange, SQL Server, IIS Server and other related facilities. In addition, most members of the General Assembly have personal and laptop computers supplied and supported by OIS with an integrated legislative office computing package. OIS has dedicated user-support and training activities and a core team that develops and supports DLS and MGA applications. OIS is structured and operated as an “inhouse” consulting group.
Business Challenge
The Office of Information Systems (OIS) was facing significant performance issues. The audio and video recording applications used by the legislature were experiencing severe degradation in their response times. This problem was being caused by a large number of cache flushes during peak usage times. The EMC unified storage system was running at 85% utilization.
Solution
The Office of Information Systems (OIS) and Potomac Information Systems decided on a comprehensive IT transformation that included the deployment of an EMC VNX5600 including the EMC Fast Suite and Flash drives. After reviewing several performance reports, the Potomac systems engineers provisioned the VNX5600 to utilize a large amount of main memory cache to eliminate the cache flush problem. Further, the engineers created the new LUN’s utilizing a three tier virtual storage pool incorporating cache, SAS, and near-line SAS disk drives to leverage EMC’s Fully Automated Storage Tiered capabilities.
The implementation of the VNX and recommended architecture by Potomac Information System’s resulted in significantly increased performance and availability.
Client
Business Challenge
Solution
Client
Maryland State Lottery and Gaming Control Agency
Potomac Services Help Modernize Unisys Clearpath MCP Application and Security Environments
The Maryland Lottery and Gaming Control Agency’s (“MLGCA”) core mission is to generate revenue to help support the good causes of Maryland including education, public health, public safety, human resources and the environment. Lottery income is the State’s third largest source of revenue, after income taxes and sales taxes.
The operation of data processing systems that support Lottery gaming activities is managed by the Information Technology division. It also provides technical assistance to the Agency, and develops and supports internal data systems, the local area network, and website infrastructure. MLGCA operates a Cisco supported network with approximately 250 workstations, 15 production servers running Windows and VMware, and a Unisys legacy mainframe computer that supports publicly accessible servers hosting various functions.
Business Challenge
The MLGCA was facing significant core competency issues surrounding the technical knowledge needed to support their Unisys MCP mainframe application and security environments. The previous IT staff had enabled several complex features within the MCP environment that were not commonly used and made modernizing the environment to a newer Windows based platform more challenging.
Solution
The MLGCA contracted Potomac Information Systems to analyze and modernize their legacy environment without “ripping and replacing” the proven software. The Potomac engineers were able to provide a suite of services including advisory, technical consulting, MCP core upgrade delivery, application modernization, and security analysis.
As a result, the environment was re-platformed on to a new Windows based Unisys Libra Clearpath system with improved application performance. In addition, MLGCA transitioned their security framework from a Locum solution taking advantage of the new security features offered within the MCP environment saving a substantial amount by not re-licensing the third party Locum security solution.