Located in Medford, Oregon, USA, Emergency Communications of Southern Oregon (ECSO 911) serves as the primary emergency dispatch facility and Public Safety Answering Point for Jackson County, including the Rogue Valley and Crater Lake National Park. The center dispatches law enforcement, fire, and emergency medical services for more than 30 agencies across a large and diverse geographic region, operating around the clock as call volume and incident types fluctuate throughout the year.
ECSO 911 operates with a lean staff, most of whom are dispatchers, supported by administrative personnel and a small IT team responsible for the data center and the systems deployed in every fire engine and police vehicle, delivering real-time dispatch data.
For the communities ECSO serves, dialing 911 carries an expectation of immediate response. For the ECSO 911 team, it represents a responsibility that leaves no room for error.
The Challenge: When Reliability Is Non-Negotiable
For a 911 center, downtime is not an inconvenience; it is a risk. ECSO 911 relies on database-driven dispatch systems to capture call details, locate addresses, determine jurisdiction, and assign resources in real time. These systems must behave consistently for every call, at any time.
Responders are frequently dispatched to unfamiliar or remote locations, where timely and accurate information is critical. ECSO’s systems must deliver guidance without delay, as even brief slowdowns can affect how efficiently information reaches the field.
Earlier in its modernization efforts, ECSO 911 encountered limitations with legacy storage and infrastructure. NAS-based systems created inconsistent performance and operational complexity, while traditional enterprise storage and redundant database licensing models were costly and difficult to sustain for a small public-sector IT team.
The team needed a storage platform that could deliver enterprise-class availability and performance without forcing them into rigid architectures or unsustainable costs. Just as importantly, they needed something they could fully understand, control, and operate themselves.
The IT Environment at ECSO 911
- Fully on-premises, hyper-converged infrastructure supporting 24×7 dispatch operations
- Eight Dell servers with direct-attached, all-flash storage; no external SAN or NAS arrays
- VMware-based virtualization platform with a planned migration to Hyper-V
- Approximately 90 virtual machines supporting production workloads
- One primary site and one DR site
- Mission-critical applications include Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD), SQL Server, Active Directory, Exchange, and core business systems
- Centralized data architecture with no local user data; profiles, documents, and desktops redirected to servers
- Approximately 300 workstations and 600 user accounts supported
The Solution: Building for Resilience from the Start
From the outset, the organization approached the deployment with a clear philosophy: design for failure so that failure never becomes visible. SANsymphony was selected as the core of a hyper-converged architecture running on VMware, enabling an all-flash storage environment built on Dell servers with direct-attached storage. This approach replaced earlier use of traditional storage platforms, including NetApp, which proved expensive and poorly suited to the organization’s size and operational needs.
“When we deployed DataCore SANsymphony, we designed everything with resiliency and reliability in mind, and that approach has paid off,” says Corey Nelson, IT Manager at ECSO 911. Over time, the environment grew to eight Dell hosts, all configured with enterprise-grade flash storage. SANsymphony virtualizes this storage and pools capacity together. It provides three-way synchronous mirroring across hosts at the primary data center and asynchronous replication to a disaster recovery site.
In addition to replication for resiliency, ECSO 911 leverages Continuous Data Protection (CDP) through SANsymphony to maintain a continuously updated, time-indexed copy of critical data. This allows the team to recover databases to precise points in time within a rolling recovery window, providing protection not only from hardware failures, but also from logical corruption, application errors, or accidental changes.
The result is an infrastructure where storage failures, host outages, and even full hardware refreshes are largely invisible to end users. “We have had hosts crash before, and dispatchers never even knew,” Corey recalls. “SANsymphony handled it transparently, so they just kept doing their jobs while we fixed things in the background.”
Performance Where Seconds Truly Matter
While resiliency was the primary driver, performance quickly became one of SANsymphony’s most appreciated qualities. ECSO 911’s core applications—including its computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system—are heavily database-driven and extremely sensitive to latency.
“When a 911 call comes in, we have to instantly query databases to find the closest address and the nearest available units—seconds matter,” Corey explains. “At this point, we don’t even think about performance anymore. SANsymphony just handles it in the background. It’s always there, and it just works.”
By combining all-flash storage with large in-memory caches allocated to each SANsymphony storage engine, ECSO 911 eliminated IOPS bottlenecks entirely.
Writes are absorbed into memory and mirrored in real time before being committed to disk, while frequently accessed data remains readily available for rapid reads. The impact has been so consistent that performance is no longer a point of concern, allowing staff to focus on operations rather than system behavior.
Recovery Without Disruption
In a 24×7 operation, maintenance and updates must be handled with extreme care. For this, ECSO 911 uses a layered recovery strategy with SANsymphony. Continuous Data Protection (CDP) provides granular, point-in-time recovery for critical data, while storage-level snapshots are used for rapid rollback during maintenance, patching, and application changes. Together, these capabilities allow the team to recover from both operational errors and unexpected failures without disruption.
ECSO 911 uses Veeam for backups, with SANsymphony supporting those operations through tight integration with Veeam. By backing up from storage snapshots rather than VM-level snapshots, performance impact and long snapshot chains are avoided while maintaining consistent backups across critical workloads.
“Two clicks, and we are back to the previous version,” Corey says. “That kind of rollback speed is incredibly powerful when you can’t afford downtime.” These same capabilities have proven invaluable during unexpected issues. In more than a decade of running SANsymphony, ECSO 911 has not lost a single piece of data. “I’m going to knock on wood,” he adds, “but in all the years I’ve been here, we haven’t lost any data, and SANsymphony has been a big part of making that possible.”
A Platform That Grows with the Organization
Over the years, ECSO 911 has completed multiple full hardware refresh cycles, including complete teardown and rebuilds of its infrastructure. Each time, SANsymphony made the process predictable and low-risk. Storage was presented back to new hosts, workloads were migrated, and operations continued without disruption.
The organization has also benefited from SANsymphony’s software-defined, vendor-agnostic design. The platform runs on VMware today, with storage abstracted from the hypervisor layer, allowing ECSO 911 to operate independently of hypervisor-specific storage constraints. Following changes to VMware’s licensing after the Broadcom acquisition, ECSO 911 began planning a migration to Hyper-V, a transition that can be completed without redesigning the storage layer.
ECSO 911 reports that DataCore support is rarely needed as the platform operates reliably day to day, but when engaged, it has been responsive and effective in resolving issues, reinforcing confidence in the platform.
SANsymphony: More Than a Storage Solution
For ECSO 911, SANsymphony has become more than just a storage platform, serving as an enabling layer that allows a small IT team to deliver enterprise-grade reliability and performance in a life-critical, 24×7 operation with effectively continuous availability throughout years of continuous operation.
