City of Wilmington

Virtual Infrastructure Saves Money, Energy

The Client

Wilmington is the largest city in the State of Delaware and is one of the major cities in the Delaware Valley metropolitan area. Under the leadership of Mayor James Baker, the City of Wilmington continually is seeking opportunities to foster economic growth while providing innovation through its initiatives.

The Business Need

Like all municipalities in today's economic climate, the City of Wilmington is continually challenged to "do more with less". At the same time, the city is facing the task of improving its IT business continuity / disaster recovery capabilities. The city's existing IT infrastructure included several physical server builds that were at or nearing their end of useful life.

The Solution

Diamond Technologies provided consulting services to the City of Wilmington to configure and implement a virtualized server infrastructure to support its business continuity / disaster recovery needs. To keep costs at a minimum, a proof of concept was developed using the City's existing physical equipment. After acceptance of the successful proof of concept, HP Proliant servers were purchased for the production implementation (4 used at the primary site, and 2 allocated for an offsite disaster recovery location). A new redundant iSCSI solution was purchased from Lefthand Networks. After full implementation data will be synchronized between the primary iSCSI SAN and a redundant unit at the offsite location to allow for very quick recovery in the event of a centralized fault at the main datacenter. Future virtualization projects for the City include an expansion of the data storage infrastructure and a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure pilot project.

Business Impact

An analysis of the total cost of ownership (TCO) estimates that the virtual infrastructure provided in this solution results in a ROI of 261.3% over a 3-year period based on the initial investment. From an environmental standpoint, the virtual infrastructure results in a reduction of 225,912 lbs (102 tons) of carbon emissions, equivalent to the average emissions of taking 19 cars off the road per year.*

*Source: VMware TCO/ROI calculator report