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Knox County CIO reports 324 July support tickets, firewall upgrades and $25,000 annual savings from server migration
Summary
Knox County CIO Trevor told commissioners the IT department handled 324 support tickets in July, is replacing firewalls across county sites after a Transit outage, and has begun migrating servers from VMware to Hyper‑V — a move Trevor said will save about $25,000 per year at the first site.
Trevor, identified in the meeting as Knox County’s chief information officer, told the Board of Commissioners that in July the county IT department responded to 324 support tickets, roughly 68% for county accounts and 32% for the city of Mount Vernon, with the remainder coming from entities including Knox Public Health, the Village of Gambier and the Village of Fredericktown.
"In July, the IT department responded to 324 support tickets," Trevor said, laying out the volume of work the department manages for multiple local governments and agencies. He told commissioners many smaller jurisdictions prefer county-provided, hourly IT support rather than a flat managed-service contract.
Trevor outlined several ongoing infrastructure projects. Staff are completing a multi-site firewall replacement program, having prioritized the larger locations first. He said a Transit firewall failed after a power outage and that IT had a spare preconfigured and deployed it that morning to restore service. Trevor also said the county renewed a firewall license for the police department to eliminate an older VPN used by cruiser mobile data terminals and to upgrade how those terminals connect with 911 servers.
On server virtualization, Trevor said the county began migrating from VMware to Microsoft Hyper-V after VMware increased licensing rates. "We'll be able to save, at least for this site, it'll be a savings of approximately 25,000 per year," he said, noting the first site using the new configuration is the 911 system and that migration work is already underway.
Commissioners asked about records-retention while staff described a separate city project: Mount Vernon will receive a new storage server to move decades of legal case files off the city's primary stack. Trevor said legal-case files may be subject to different retention rules and that IT had built a large storage appliance to help the city move its legacy files.
The CIO also reported the county provided temporary support to Knox Public Health while that agency's IT staff were on vacation and confirmed IT is building a sequestered network for the sheriff’s Internet Crimes Against Children unit to keep sensitive investigative data isolated from the general county network. The board thanked Trevor and the IT team before moving on to other items.
