The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department (RCSD) is the second largest sheriff’s department and third largest police agency in California.
Its internal IT team manages the law enforcement technology that helps keep all the department’s 4,000 employees protected while improving public safety. That technology includes leveraging massive amounts of data from multiple departments, locations, and functions. Data sources range from external databases like the FBI’s fingerprint and DNA databases, to investigative bureaus that run the gamut of crime investigation and prevention, to internal data management systems.
The RCSD turned to Qumulo for a centralized data platform that was easy to manage, dynamically scalable to support massive and growing capacity, and could easily serve up relevant data to multiple end-users and applications.
Improving day-to-day operations with data analytics.
RCSD uses Qumulo’s real-time analytics to identify trending data from the field and allow deputies to safely respond to changing circumstances. For example, the IT team keeps yearly crime trending statistics so the RCSD knows where to apply its resources.
“Accurate and real-time trending information improves decisions, which saves lives,.” said David Emery, Supervising Systems Administrator, Riverside County Sheriff’s Department. “Data analytics was important to us, and we were surprised that the other solutions didn’t provide the depth of Qumulo’s analytics. We didn’t even know that some of these tools existed. Once we saw the powerful scope of Qumulo’s analytics, we wanted those features.”
Analytics also enables the IT team to optimize the Qumulo system for the best performance and visibility. “Moving from no analytics on the legacy systems to rich analytics on Qumulo has been a game-changer. All the events, file copies, moves, and creates were hard to impossible to see before. Now that we have that kind of information available to us, we are able to improve our day to day operations and better plan for the future,” said Emery.
Extreme scalability and performance enables long-term retention and simplified system management.
Investigative data contains large rich media files that do not compress well. As recording resolutions grow, these files get larger and larger. Having the ability to use SSD cache for performance coupled with lower cost disk for long term retention was a requirement for RCSD. Qumulo’s software-driven automated caching eliminated this complexity, delivering the benefit of each storage technology but with simple and automated system management.
Although the RCSD is not yet in the cloud, the cloud will likely be a future option or requirement. Since Qumulo also runs natively in the cloud and can provide the data management between locations, it gives the IT team the flexibility to move workloads securely and efficiently when the time comes.
“Qumulo gives us the flexibility to grow quickly with little or no impact to the users. This is something we never had with our legacy systems, and it’s going to be a huge benefit moving forward,” said Emery
Cost Effective Performance Enabled IT to Deploy 3X the Capacity Within Budget.
Qumulo offered its advanced feature set at a significantly lower price than the other vendors — and significantly lower than what IT had budgeted for. Savings were driven by Qumulo’s low cost per terabyte, which enabled IT to deploy triple the capacity at the same budgeted price.
Over the next few months, IT will migrate the remaining data from each of its forty physical locations to the centralized Qumulo file data platform. And in 2021, three major application upgrades that will go live and create even more data. The new dispatch applications used by deputies and 911 dispatchers, records management systems that store data from the field and county jails, and the county jail management system will all leverage Qumulo. The IT team will be able to efficiently send this massive amount of data to the centralized Qumulo without capacity or performance worries.
“Deploying Qumulo was a no-brainer. It solved every issue we had at a lower cost than we expected and delivered features that no one else could provide. Needless to say, it was an easy decision,” said Emery.
Learn More
Read the full case study about the benefits that the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department was able to realize with Qumulo here.
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