Government Computer News
Wireless rules for Oregon courts
High-speed connection links network and data facilities, supporting offices statewide.
Officials at the Oregon Judicial Department (OJD) ran into a problem several years ago when they began looking for a new home for the department’s information technology staff and equipment.
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Managers had to figure out how to connect the network operations center (NOC) with the state’s data center and support more than 2,000 department employees at 70 locations statewide without requiring IT staff members to spend all their time on the road.
“We needed to do two things,” OJD Chief Information Officer Bud Borja said. “We wanted to move our equipment into a real data center, and our office building was being relocated at the same time.”
Ideally, the two would go to the same place, but — as so often happens in the real world — that is not the way it worked out.
“We are downtown, so we had the constraint of physical space in downtown Salem being at a premium,” Borja said, referring to the state’s capital. “The cost of building a data center was not something we wanted to take on.”
The data center moved to a facility that is shared with other state agencies and also contains the state’s disaster center, to which the governor relocates in times of emergency. But the IT staff ’s new home left them somewhat cut off. “The building we ended up choosing for our staff was not on any current path of fiber that we could tap in to,” Borja said.
The solution was a high-speed wireless bridge that enabled IT managers to establish virtual fiber-optic connections between locations.
The IT department chose a wireless Gigabit Ethernet link to connect the network operations center with the state Supreme Court building, which sits on the state’s fiber-optic backbone. They selected the AdaptRate60 bridge from BridgeWave Communications.
Since its installation early last year, the wireless network has provided uninterrupted communications with virtually no latency via a pipe big enough to let the IT staff restore a remote desktop in five minutes.
“I think of this pretty much as a fiber connection,” said Ollie Brown, infrastructure manager.
“We have had foggy days, which were a concern, and it hummed right through it.”
It also operated at its full data rate through torrential rains, said Brian Canfield, the department’s telecommunications administrator.
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