Governance for Vilas County occurs at Eagle River, its largest city and a popular vacation and retirement destination. There, the county has a courthouse, a jail, and other governmental facilities, all of which are supported by a local data center.
To support public safety, the county launched an initiative to record all activity within its courthouse and jail. Initially, it had to rely on VHS cameras, but this approach was not feasible at the scale the county wanted. VHS tapes had to be replaced multiple times every day for each camera and then stored somewhere. The process was cumbersome, time-consuming, and costly.
Vilas County then switched to digital cameras when the technology became available, and began saving its digital surveillance footage on an HP MSA storage device.