Sioux County, Iowa, Builds Better Connectivity

The Internet has become a mission-critical part of daily business for Sioux County, Iowa, allowing county employees access to e-mail and resources necessary to their jobs, and enabling public access to county services and information. But the addition of high-traffic applications such as voter registration and property search would sometimes overload Internet connections and cause network congestion. In addition, service provider outages created other challenges.

"Internet uptime is very critical to us, as we host our own Web site," said Sioux County IT Director Micah Van Maanen. "In addition to other application servers, we internally host two property search Web sites that are used by banks, real estate agents, the Abstract office and other cities within our county ... Cities access our servers to get zoning data.  Engineering firms rely upon our servers to help cities that they're working with on road projects. So we can't afford to have any Internet downtime."

Sioux County made a decision to build in wide area network redundancy by replacing its single T1 Internet connection, with two SDSL Internet connections. The county deployed Ecessa PowerLink WAN link controllers in its datacenter to automatically load balance inbound and outbound network traffic among the two connections, and provide failover in the event that one of the connections has an outage.

"Since we purchased the PowerLink," said Van Maanen, "we have had no Internet downtime. Whereas before, when we would have an Internet outage our 85 employees would become very frustrated. Without Internet access, they can't do their jobs effectively. Compound that with outside users' inablility to access our servers, and you can imagine the headache and frustration involved."

When a user types in the Web address, PowerLink automatically directs users to the Internet connection that is performing the best at that particular time. If one of the Internet connections is down, PowerLink sends users to the IP address of the Internet connection that is working.

Bandwidth Savings
The T1 (1.5Mbps upstream and downstream) connection was costing Sioux County $650 per month, while the two SDSL connections (1.5Mbps up/down) together cost $225 per month; this saves $5,100 each year. Sioux County acquired two PowerLink100s at a total cost of $5,990. Due to the bandwidth cost savings, Sioux County had a positive return on investment in just over a year, according to the company.