Case Study: City of Austin achieves scalable, cost-effective object storage with Caringo Swarm

City of Austin Nabs a Caringo Object Storage System for Business-Critical Architecture

The City of Austin's Public Safety division, responsible for managing immense volumes of in-car police video data, faced significant challenges with their traditional NAS storage. The system could not scale efficiently to handle 2-4 terabytes of new data daily and was becoming prohibitively expensive to maintain. Network systems architect Tony Williams sought a new, scalable solution that would reduce costs and avoid the limitations of file-based storage, leading them to evaluate object storage and the vendor Caringo.

Caringo’s Swarm object storage was implemented on commodity Dell hardware, providing a highly scalable and cost-effective platform. The solution enabled the city to tier cold data from their NAS to Swarm for archival, leveraging rich metadata for easy search and retrieval. Key benefits included real-time replication across two data centers for protection, compliance with stringent government standards like CJIS, and a shift to a more operational expenditure (OPEX) model. The City of Austin achieved substantial cost savings, estimating a reduction of at least half the cost over a single refresh cycle while greatly improving data scalability and protection.

City of Austin

Tony Williams

Communications Commander