Case Study: Allegheny County Emergency Services achieves continuous 99.99% uptime for multi-jurisdictional 9-1-1 dispatch with Stratus Technologies

Stratus Delivers CONTINUOUS AVAILABILITY For Multi-Jurisdictional Police, Fire And Emergency Services

Allegheny County Emergency Services, which handles roughly 1.5 million emergency and non‑emergency calls a year (4,500–5,000 daily) across 130 municipalities, needed to replace decade‑old UNIX dispatch systems with a modern, cost‑effective platform that guaranteed continuous availability. The county required a fully integrated, redundant solution (primary and disaster‑recovery sites) that would maintain 99.99% uptime and support mission‑critical CAD, remote CAD, mobile data, web query and records interfaces for dozens of police, fire and EMS agencies.

The county implemented redundant Stratus ftServer systems with ftScalable storage, Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server and VMware virtualization, synchronizing primary and overflow centers in near real time. The solution hosts the CAD applications and database on fault‑tolerant virtual machines, supports hundreds of mobile users and hundreds of web users, and uses self‑healing hardware plus 24/7 Stratus support. The result is continuous, highly resilient operations with rapid failover, meeting the county’s uptime requirement and preventing downtime that could delay emergency response.

Allegheny County Emergency Services

Gary J. Thomas

Assistant Chief/9-1-1 Coordinator