IT Infrastructure – MCA 2-17-521(4) (a)

This section fulfills MCA 2-17-521(4) (a) regarding the analysis of the state’s information technology infrastructure, including its value, condition, and capacity.

Data Centers and Disaster Recovery

The State of Montana Data Center (SMDC) is in Helena, Montana. The state offers equipment hosting services to entities inside and outside of the state of Montana and has the capacity to house 247 server cabinets. The environmentally friendly SMDC features a state-of-the-art primary cooling system by KyotoCooling and was the first of its kind in the country. SMDC was the first data center in the world to be built from the ground up using this technology. The SMDC features ISOBase platforms that are utilized by all equipment racks that reduce the risk of failure in the event of an earthquake.

The Miles City Data Center (MCDC) is a Disaster Recovery (DR) site for critical applications housed within the SMDC. This facility can be used for production, as well as DR services for any governmental entity. The MCDC is strategically located between two power grids. The MCDC uses conventional CRAC cooling.

SMDC and MCDC were designed to meet the following qualifications:

• Critical Infrastructure DOD Security Standards LEED Certified
• Green Building Rating System
• The SMDC Facility is staffed 24x7x365
• They are monitored 24x7x365
• They are surrounded by anti-climb fences
• Two-factor physical security access is required to enter both facilities
• They can withstand an 8.0 earthquake

Enterprise Computing and Storage

Infrastructure and application services are offered to agencies, universities, and local governments. Servers, storage, backup services, DDI (DNS, DHCP, IPAM), and load balancing infrastructure are delivered to customers using the State of Montana Data Centers including full disaster recovery services for the infrastructure. Security and management services are provided including multi-factor authentication, machine data analytics, and mobile device. Additionally, support for the infrastructure of Microsoft applications, both in the State Data Centers and hosted by Microsoft in the government tenant space. These services include email, identity management, SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, and TEAMS.

Storage services are provided to customers utilizing multiple clustered storage systems located in the SMDC and MCDC. These systems provide highly available storage and disaster recovery. SITSD currently provides nearly 3 Petabytes (PB) of storage in SMDC and MCDC with the ability to scale too over 100PB to meet customer needs. Long term storage is provided to customers using WORM (Write Once Read Many) compliant storage.

Compute services are offered to customers using virtualization software that provides flexible control, automation, and autonomy to meet agencies unique business needs for server resources. These services include automated DR to MCDC and backup services in Helena and Miles City. Automation has enabled the state of Montana to meet the rapid server needs of agencies, in turn this has improved service to customers. Highly available load balancing and proxy services are available to customers using load balancers located at SMDC and MCDC. The load balancers provide WAF (Web Application Firewall) to protect state websites from vulnerabilities.

The following tables provide an inventory of storage and compute assets for each agency in the state of Montana.