cityofboston.gov - Official Web Site of the City of Boston - Thomas M. Menino, Mayor

Consolidation

As reported previously, we consolidated a number of data centers.  This year was no different.  We continued to evaluate remaining physical data centers throughout the City and brought the Public Health and Emergency Medical Services into the data center at City Hall.  However, for City Hall to continue its path for further consolidation, we needed to increase and improve its electrical capacity and reliability by upgrading the Power Distribution Units (PDU) from 75kVA to 125kVA as well as growing from one PDU to two PDUs for reliability and redundancy.  Electrical wiring standards were introduced and eliminated unnecessary bundles of electrical circuits that have traditionally affected airflow.  The new PDUs also now afford us ample growth capacity.

Furthermore, we took the opportunity during the upgrade to re-assess the use of the data center space.  We standardized on server racks, installed in-rack PDUs for every rack to monitor and meter power consumption, and introduced new cabling standards to eliminate the ‘cabling mess’ that has accumulated over the years.  Hot and cold aisles were also created.  All of these efforts are leading to better energy efficiency and power management, as well as developed a path where future rack growths can be accommodated. For the upcoming year, we will assess the air conditioning units in the data center as they have reached their life expectancy (20+ years).  We will work collaboratively with our utility supplier, NSTAR, for funding opportunities as we seek a new and energy efficient cooling solution.

Virtualization

Virtualization has become a standard business operation at the City.  As server requests are reviewed, the primary consideration is whether the servers are virtualization capable.  As an ongoing effort to convert remaining physical servers to virtual servers, we completed the conversion of DMZ servers in the past year. We currently have over 500 virtualized servers. By leveraging FastCache technology, we are also able to provision inexpensive drives, and yet, keep the same high level of service.

Colocation

While we now have increased capacity to host services in the City Hall data center, we must continue to work on our disaster recovery capability.  To enable progress on that front, we recently acquired a colocation space reachable by the City’s fiber network.  This site is intended for use not only by City Hall but by other agencies.  For City Hall, this space will be used to expand on the current service failover site at the Boston Police Department.  With the availability of this space, agencies are now working on their disaster recovery plans and will make use of this colocation space to support their mission critical services.

In this fiscal year, we will be lighting up our first co-location site in step with our overall plan to ensure business continuity in case of unanticipated outages to our City Hall Data center.  This is been done in conjunction with and the support of the Mayor’s COOP plan for overall continuity of the city’s critical IT infrastructure and services.  This new site option opens allows us to further investigate the viability of IAAS and SAAS in our organization.

Shared Services

FY11 saw an increase in dialogue leading to collaborative efforts among agencies through the IT Shared Services Group and project management.  The most significant achievement is the introduction of Change Management processes to agencies, thus increasing communication between City Hall and agencies about technology changes and implementation of new services.  This year we plan to optimize our reporting and trending capabilities, setting the stage for a hybrid cloud solution.  In the coming year, we will be upgrading our Exchange infrastructure to Exchange 2010 which will provide more granular administration.  Other areas where shared services are extended include the implementation of Voice over IP as well as the standardization applied in data center space (racks, PDUs, cabling, etc.)

In addition, project management support is extended to city agencies.  As an example, with the City having completed a PDU upgrade project, the project management expertise and experience are now offered to the Boston Police Department as they begin their PDU upgrade project at their data center.