Bob Henderson, Director of IT for Cass County, North Dakota, leads the mission-critical operations for a major governmental body serving a quarter of the state's population.
Operating in the tech-forward "Silicon Prairie," Bob's centralized IT department provides 24/7/365 mission-critical support for everything from law enforcement and finance to infrastructure, all while adhering to the public sector's ultimate challenge: to deliver more with less.
This philosophy isn't just a saying; it’s a mandate. As Bob Henderson explained, "The idiom of doing more with less is not just an idiom to us, it's a mantra. It's what we live by." The goal to maximize efficiency without compromising essential services drove Cass County to seek an infrastructure solution that could offer high-level performance while meeting strict budget requirements.
The Challenge: Cost, Control, and the Search for True High Availability
Cass County’s core operational difficulty lay in securing a resilient and cost-effective data storage solution capable of providing true synchronous data replication across their multiple dispersed physical sites. Since their virtual environment ran on Hyper-V, they required a storage platform that could handle instant failover cleanly, as Hyper-V is notoriously sensitive to even minor storage hiccups.
The Cost Barrier and Vendor Lock-in
When exploring traditional, proprietary High Availability (HA) storage solutions, the county faced unsustainable costs. Bob noted that quotes from legacy vendors for identical CPU, RAM, and drive specifications were consistently "around 40 grand higher" than 45Drives. For a public entity operating on a responsible budget, legacy vendor costs were unacceptable. Moreover, these solutions would have introduced vendor lock-in, subjecting the county to forced renewals and arbitrary price hikes.
The Imperative for Data Sovereignty and Security
Perhaps the most critical challenge was maintaining absolute control and security over sensitive data. For departments handling sensitive prosecutorial evidence and law enforcement data, there is a strict requirement for air-gapped, on-premise networks. Bob views outsourcing this control as a risk to public service: "I never want to have a citizen call up and say, '10 years ago I used this... and tell them, 'No, we no longer have access to that because a vendor took it away.' To me, that is a failure of government." He emphasized that data security needs to be airtight: "We deal with information that cloud our cloud services, including the big ones will not touch."
The Solution: A Performance Upgrade Made Possible with 45Drives’ Stornados
The search for a true, robust, and open alternative led Bob to 45Drives. Initially, his team, which was historically accustomed to Windows environments, was hesitant about moving to open-source solutions running on Linux. However, rigorous internal testing quickly resolved any doubts. The team validated the resilience by simulating failures, even "pulling wires" on a running SQL failover cluster.
The decision was clear, and the cost savings were immediate and transformative. Cass County purchased a pair of 45Drives Stornado units with full NVMe storage.
The budget surplus created by choosing 45Drives over proprietary options allowed for an incredible upgrade. "We ended up purchasing a pair of the Stornado’s with full NVMe," Bob confirmed. "We were able to update from NVMe to meet our capacity requirements because we were that far under cost." This NVMe upgrade secured a performance tier that was previously entirely out of reach.
Bob also valued the direct, unscripted support: "If I need help, I have trusted advisors that I can pick up the phone and call. They're going to treat me like an adult versus walking me through a script of troubleshooting." This partnership ensured the team could confidently manage their new infrastructure.
Beyond Cost Savings: Measurable Outcomes and Resiliency
The deployment of the 45Drives Stornado units delivered immediate, measurable operational improvements, impacting the county's services directly:
Accelerated Operations
The sheer I/O performance provided by the new NVMe Stornados proved to be a shock to their existing infrastructure, demonstrating the massive capability increase. Bob noted that the new speed revealed a bottleneck in an unexpected place: the Windows operating system itself.
"The storage was so fast, Windows errored out because it didn't know how to handle the amount of I/O we were pushing through it."
This unprecedented speed ultimately translated into massive efficiency gains. Bob confirmed that the change was substantial: "It allowed for our backup windows to go down by 34%... Every night our backups go about two and a half hours faster just because of the new storage is now that much faster."
Three-Hour Disaster Recovery Guarantee
The true measure of success was achieving Disaster Recovery Assurance. Leveraging the cost savings, the county was able to implement a 100 Gb replication backbone between their sites seven miles apart. This enabled genuine synchronous replication.
The team rigorously tested their failover scenarios and validated the system's resilience: "I can lose a complete site through a tornado or whatever kind of disaster and be back up with our full environment... under three hours," Bob explained. This level of guaranteed uptime is paramount for a government agency facing real-world crises. Bob powerfully summarized the importance of this capability: "If we're having a bad day, our citizens are having a worse one. And we need to be able to serve them however we can."
By choosing 45Drives, Cass County proved that a public sector IT team can break free from expensive vendor lock-in, achieve top-tier performance, and uphold its commitment to fiscal responsibility and citizen service.
Empowering Your Infrastructure Decisions
If your organization is looking to replace high-cost, proprietary IT with a high-performance, open-platform solution that gives you complete data control, the answer is clear.
Learn how 45Drives empowers government agencies, enterprises, and IT teams to achieve mission-critical resilience and maintain fiscal responsibility.