Case Study: St. Charles County, Missouri achieves continuous 24/7 CAD availability and faster emergency response with Stratus Technologies' ftServer

CONTINUOUS AVAILABILITY For Dynamic, Cross-Jurisdictional CAD Speeds Response Time To Save Lives

St. Charles County Department of Dispatch and Alarm provides countywide, cross-jurisdictional dispatch for 34 fire stations and 16 ambulance bases, handling more than 40,000 calls a year and protecting over 350,000 residents. The agency needed continuous 24/7/365 availability, fast dynamic unit assignment (including real-time “unit swap”), and easy administration with a single IT manager — downtime, even for maintenance, would force time-consuming manual record recovery and could cost lives.

They deployed TriTech VisiCAD and VisiNet Mobile on Stratus ftServer systems (with a second ftServer repurposed as a data warehouse), replacing a complex cluster setup. The always-on solution and proactive Stratus support delivered near-zero downtime (their original ftServer ran more than a decade without interruption), simplified management, enabled faster, closest-unit dispatching in real time, and materially improved response times — outcomes the department credits with helping save lives.

St. Charles County, Missouri

Bob Watts

Director, Department of Dispatch and Alarm