California Highway Patrol Dispatches Novell Solutions to Rein in Endpoints and Reduce IT Administration Costs

Novell today announced the California Highway Patrol (CHP), the largest state police agency in the United States, has successfully cut the cost of managing its IT infrastructure by implementing a broad suite of Novell® solutions. With Novell, the CHP gained granular control of more than 10,000 end user devices with ZENworks® Configuration Management, reduced its data center operations costs by more than $800,000 using Novell Open Enterprise Server with Xen* virtualization, and reduced the number of user passwords by 75 percent with Novell Identity Manager.

With just 60 IT professionals to support the organization’s 10,000 users and network infrastructure, the CHP needed a more efficient way to centrally manage the department's numerous endpoint devices and cost effectively reduce IT administration. In addition to command centers, the IT staff is responsible for 20 emergency dispatch sites that respond to thousands of 9-1-1 calls from citizens. With little room for error or downtime, the CHP needed a solution that allowed them to continually deliver the best support resources within budget.

"The remote control feature of Novell ZENworks Configuration Management gives us the ability to centrally support our large, dispersed desktop environment with a very small staff," said Bruce McLeod, system architect, Network Services, for the California Highway Patrol. "It allows us to quickly troubleshoot our users’ desktops and laptops in a consistent manner, which is especially helpful for our dispatch sites that obviously need to be up and running at all times."

By using Novell ZENworks Configuration Management, the CHP is able to centrally and automatically manage its 7,500 desktops and 3,000 laptops and support mission-critical applications across the state with minimal IT staff. In addition, ZENworks Configuration Management allows the organization to easily manage its inventory of devices, quickly troubleshoot systems, and deliver applications to all endpoints within the enterprise in just a matter of hours.

The CHP also tapped Novell Open Enterprise Server with Xen virtualization, which allowed them to consolidate one-third of the servers in its data center. In addition, CHP implemented Novell Identity Manager to simplify password management across more than a dozen applications, including CARS, its traffic accident reporting system. As a result, the IT staff has nearly eliminated time-intensive manual processes related to password management and reduced the number of passwords users have to remember.

"Government and public safety organizations at every level are continually battling budget and bandwidth constraints, which makes the technology they chose to keep their departments up and running critical to achieving their objectives," said Joe Wagner, senior vice president and general manager for Systems and Resource Management at Novell. "The combination of efficient endpoint management and server consolidation can effectively reduce the burden and the cost of IT maintenance. With Novell solutions, the California Highway Patrol can concentrate on policing roads and highways and protecting public safety instead of supporting technology."

To learn more about Novell Endpoint Management solutions, visit http://www.novell.com/endpoint. For more information about Novell Identity Management solutions, visit http://www.novell.com/identity. More about Novell Open Enterprise Server is available at http://www.novell.com/products/openenterpriseserver.