A Network & Data Center Infrastructure Case Study

The Technology Behind Voting

This Board of Elections is the governmental body responsible for administering all public elections across the city. Their environment spans five borough offices, each paired with an equipment warehouse used to stage and store voting systems and hardware.

From a technology standpoint, the environment had gone largely untouched for more than two decades. Core switching equipment from the 1980s was still in production.

Interborough connectivity relied on T1 circuits that had not kept pace with the volume or velocity of data the Board now needed to move. A passive disaster recovery site existed locally but required manual IT intervention to activate, making it functionally unreliable as a failover. The IT team managing all of this numbered fewer than five people responsible citywide.

Challenges Facing the Voting Process

A lot was at stake here. Voter registration data, election results, and polling transfer workflows all depend on a SQL-based system processing data between branch offices and centralized data centers. On the legacy network, transfers were slow and failure-prone, and when connectivity dropped, the process had to be restarted. These issues made building extra time into results cycles to compensate for anticipated failures inevitable.

Backup operations were no better. Jobs that should have completed overnight regularly ran into production hours. The passive DR site wasn't truly available without manual intervention. And with a small IT team spread across the city, even routine troubleshooting required physical travel to sites.

The Board knew they needed something different. The question was whether any vendor could translate that need into a design worth trusting.

Why Derive Was Right for the Job

Derive had been working with this Board of Elections in an advisory and support capacity for years before this project began. Derive was assisting with issues on infrastructure we hadn't originally deployed, keeping systems functional while longer-term planning moved forward.

When the Board evaluated options for a full infrastructure overhaul, Derive had already proven its engineering credibility on the client's own environment. The team also brought a design philosophy that aligned with where the Board wanted to go: future-proofed, site-independent, and built for the operational realities of a lean IT team managing a geographically distributed footprint.

Derive also proposed ongoing Managed Services to support the environment post-implementation, ensuring the Board wasn't left to operate a newly modernized infrastructure without a partner.

What Changed

Derive designed and implemented a network and data center infrastructure solution built around a four-site active architecture, distributed to maximize geographic separation and minimize shared-risk exposure.

At the core of the data center architecture, Derive deployed Cisco Nexus switching running Cisco ACI in a multi-site configuration. ACI enabled application-aware policy enforcement, automated micro-segmentation between workloads, and full traffic separation between production, management, and infrastructure networks. Cisco Catalyst switches served the distribution layer, with Cisco Meraki deployed at the access edge across all eleven locations.

The WAN connecting offices was rebuilt from the ground up. T1 circuits were replaced with a 12-strand dark fiber full mesh delivering 100Gbps connections between sites: a dramatic leap in both speed and reliability. Inside the data centers, switching density scaled from approximately 12 switches to 40 and port density was doubled from 24 to 48 ports.

Check Point firewall technology was incorporated into the design for perimeter security, providing full enterprise firewall across the environment.

Cisco Meraki's cloud-managed dashboard gave the IT team real-time visibility into all eleven locations from a single pane of glass. Role-based access controls (RBAC) were implemented across the environment to enforce least-privilege access for different staff roles across the organization.

ACI's built-in automation provided proactive alerting on power supply failures, interface degradation, and fiber link issues: surfacing problems before they became production incidents and routing them to Derive's managed services team for resolution.

How Implementation Changed this Municipalities Voting Infrastructure

The operational improvements following go-live were visible across multiple layers of the Board's environment.

Polling data transfers that had previously taken days were now completed in minutes. Backup jobs that couldn't finish within overnight maintenance windows became routine and reliable. Email application performance became nearly instantaneous.

The Meraki dashboard transformed how the IT team managed a multi-site environment. With real-time endpoint visibility across all eleven locations, staff could triage and resolve the majority of support tickets remotely, reserving on-site visits for situations that genuinely required them. For the small team of people responsible for sites across all five boroughs, that change in operational leverage was significant.

Network security was fundamentally improved. ACI micro-segmentation enforced application-level isolation, separating infrastructure management traffic from production user traffic entirely. Check Point firewall services delivered enterprise-grade perimeter security with threat detection, filtering, and intrusion prevention enabled across the environment. Telephony modernization, enabled in part by the additional port capacity built into the access layer refresh, was also completed post go-live.

The new architecture itself gave the Board something it had never truly had: the ability to lose a site and continue operating without manual intervention.

Helping Organizations Modernize Infrastructure with Confidence

Derive Technologies works with organizations navigating infrastructure modernization, vendor consolidation, and long-term technology planning. As an MBE-certified IT solutions provider with deep experience in hyperconverged infrastructure, Derive brings both the technical expertise and the strategic perspective that complex migrations require.