Presidio Networked Solutions (
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City of West Palm Beach to upgrade its IT systems and services for New City Center Project.
Presidio officials while giving details of its successful collaboration with the City of West Palm Beach, Florida said that the City looked to the company to expand and restructure its network infrastructure and telephony systems, utilizing virtualization for its New City Center project.
The City first chose to migrate to a comprehensive
Cisco IP-based voice and data infrastructure, thereby avoiding a costly update and expansion of its legacy PBX (
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Officials claimed that the new infrastructure, built on a single network to support its voice and data services, allowed the City to realize identifiable savings of over $700,000 in reduced cabling costs alone, while providing dramatic reductions in operating expenditures within the first year.
"The decision to move to an IP-based telephony system eliminated the need to expand our PBX system and cabling infrastructure, a costly endeavor considering the labor required to install it, the immense space to house it, and the down time necessary to migrate to it," said Chuck Osteen, communications manager for the City of West Palm Beach, in a statement.
Osteen said that together, these factors would have had a significant negative impact on the City's bottom line, as well as the services that its citizens rely on.
“With the new datacenter configuration, we are able to split the City's two servers by location, each in a different datacenter, to ensure business continuity during the move and later, in the event of an extended power outage.”
He said that the servers are fully redundant, which enabled to make the move with no noticeable interruption in city services. The new configuration ensures that if one server ever fails or is incapacitated, the other will keep the critical systems up and running.
"We have been able to leverage our success in the commercial markets and bring business-enhancing solutions to state agencies and municipalities throughout our region," stated Dale Shilling, executive vice president of Presidio Networked Solutions.
Shilling said that he feels that, with a strong technology background and service culture, Presidio is ahead of the curve by helping public sector customers navigate the waters in planning, designing and deploying new solutions -- to maximize the benefits of virtualization and other solutions.
"While our initial investment was significant, the ROI was nearly tenfold in total savings," said Chuck Osteen.
Osteen said that long-term benefits also include consolidation of the Bell circuits and the flexibility to easily add, move and change, as the dynamics of the City evolve -- without the addition of station cards or complex wiring changes.
According to Osteen, the design of the new IT infrastructure has also made it possible for the City to achieve a more reliable disaster relief and recovery response plan.
Anil Sharma is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Anil’s articles, please visit his columnist page.Edited by
Tim Gray
