VMware Helps City of Aurora Serve Citizens, Cut Costs
VMware Helps City of Aurora Serve Citizens, Cut Costs
Colorado City Leverages VMware Platform to Improve Timeliness and Reliability of Public Services, Achieves 100-percent ROI in 90 Days
“It was clear that our hardware-based approach to IT had to change,” said Steve Jenovai, senior systems administrator for the city of Aurora. “We simply can’t afford downtime in our infrastructure, and budgetary realities make it impossible to just throw money at the situation. Thanks to VMware, we’ve been able to consolidate 70 boxes down to five, with each box running close to 20 VMs. It has simplified system management dramatically while eliminating downtime and saving taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Jenovai noted that provisioning of new VMs could be done in minutes, compared to the two weeks that used to be required for ordering, installing and configuring a physical server. This has helped the city become much more responsive to changing demands from residents. Likewise, VMware VMotion technology has been extremely valuable in helping ensure application availability by allowing the IT staff to move VMs during routine maintenance of physical hosts or when problems arise. And, VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) helps ensure outstanding performance by dynamically adding or reducing resources for specific applications as demand ebbs and flows.
“We took a long look at all virtual server offerings,” said Jenovai. “It quickly became a very easy decision. VMware provides a true virtualization solution, not just a hypervisor. VMware gives us a mature toolset, centralized manageability, DR capabilities and OS independence. We didn’t find any other virtualization offerings that could match it. And the fact that we could achieve 100-percent ROI in 90 days was phenomenal. And that’s just from hardware savings. We’ve also reduced power consumption and space requirements.”
