Arkansas Department of Transportation boosts reliability

The Arkansas Department of Transportation (ARDOT) is the state agency that plans, builds, and maintains Arkansas’s transportation system, including more than 16,000 miles of state highways and the Arkansas Highway Police. ARDOT’s mission is to provide a safe, efficient, aesthetically pleasing, and environmentally sound intermodal transportation system for users across the state. Beyond highways, ARDOT leads statewide transportation planning, manages public transit programs, administers Federal-Aid projects, operates traffic management systems, and promotes road safety initiatives.

The Arkansas Department of Transportation oversees 16,000 miles of highways, traffic management systems, and the Arkansas Highway Police, ensuring the safety of millions of travelers across the state. ARDOT's technology infrastructure is the backbone that keeps Arkansas moving safely.

"Our mission statement is to deliver modern transportation systems to enhance safety and quality of life in Arkansas," says Eric Simpson, IT Infrastructure and Cybersecurity Manager at ARDOT. "From the IT infrastructure side, I provide the technology backbone that helps make all that happen."

That backbone supports critical operations like the Interstate 430 bridge lane management system, which automatically opens additional lanes during heavy traffic. "We've got to make sure all the cameras are operational because we have to check all the lanes before we open them," explains Simpson. "Otherwise you end up with heavy traffic congestion or even safety issues."

When Simpson became infrastructure manager, he set an ambitious goal: "I wanted to have one of the best infrastructures of any DOT in the United States." But achieving that vision required overcoming significant challenges.

For a transportation department managing traffic cameras and emergency dispatch systems, infrastructure reliability is critical for public safety. Simpson faced pressing challenges: 24/7 reliability requirements, slow and expensive legacy disaster recovery solutions, growing cybersecurity threats, and unpredictable IT costs that made strategic planning nearly impossible.

"There's a lot of safety concerns," Simpson notes. "Being able to identify and communicate what's going on in real time on the roadways to keep motorists informed, law enforcement informed, and our maintenance personnel as well, a lot of that is technology-driven and requires rapid communication."

After evaluating multiple solutions, Simpson selected Pure Storage, driven by the Pure Storage vision of an Enterprise Data Cloud. Built on the Pure Storage platform, the Enterprise Data Cloud is a unified architecture and operating model that transforms how data is delivered, protected, and governed across every environment, whether on premises, in the public cloud, or at the edge. Through the platform virtualizes all storage into a single data layer, managed by intelligent automation and policy, and delivers a cloud-like experience for all workloads and workflows. ARDOT opted for the flexibility of the consumption model with Evergreen//One™ for storage as a service (STaaS) and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), implementing FlashArray™ with SafeMode™ Snapshots and FlashBlade//S™ for backups and analytics.

"Pure Storage helps us build that trust because it's so consistent and reliable," says Simpson. "The Pure Storage platform has the uptime that we needed. It gives us the service that we can pass on to our business units, our customers, and our citizens." 

The results exceeded expectations: "In all my years as the infrastructure manager, we've never had to open a ticket," Simpson emphasizes. “The proactive support that we always get from Pure Storage sometimes identifies issues before we even detect them."

Beyond reliability, Simpson recognized that the Enterprise Data Cloud approach aligned with ARDOT's strategic vision. "The Enterprise Data Cloud concept resonates with us quite well," says Simpson. "It's not just about this one thing or this one piece of equipment. The enterprise is bigger than that. It's a lot of different aspects that all work together. So Enterprise Data Cloud makes a lot of sense."

The platform enabled remarkable improvements. High-performance flash storage allows rapid data ingestion from road sensors and drone imagery for asset management, as well as a huge improvement in disaster recovery capabilities. "We're looking at an RTO of four hours now with our most critical systems," says Simpson. "That's just next-level for us." The three-layer protection model also eliminates the need for a costly second data center.

The DRaaS solution saves millions in capital expenditure that can now be invested in roadways and citizen services, and the STaaS model revolutionized budget planning: "The storage as a service has been a life changer," notes Simpson. "When executive leadership says, ‘what's our cost going to be in five years,’ I can tell them with very good accuracy."

All maintenance and upgrades are nondisruptive, performed during business hours. "We don't have to worry about scheduling an entire weekend for my team," Simpson says. This frees IT staff for strategic innovation.

For Simpson, the partnership delivers confidence in serving Arkansas citizens. "Having Pure Storage really brings you a lot of peace and puts you at ease knowing that there's things that can go wrong, but that's not one of them."

Looking ahead, Simpson is excited about implementing new tools that can help his team. "I think [Pure] Fusion is just going to be one more tool that they're going to be able to use to automate a lot of things, and shift off of some of the day-to-day grind," he explains. 

For Simpson, the work is personal: "It's nice to know that I'm doing my part to help my neighbor and to help my family and my grandkids and everybody to be safe."