Contact Information: Contacts: Gary Good Trainer Communications (707) 837-1718 pre@trainercomm.com Todd Brinegar Presidio Networked Solutions (301) 313-2086 tbrinegar@presidio.com
Presidio Networked Solutions Helps the City of West Palm Beach Upgrade Its IT Systems and Services for New City Center Project
Federal Grant and Stimulus Funding Enables State and Local Entities to Fund Similar Solutions for Improved Communications, Safety and Energy Efficiency
| Source: Presidio Networked Solutions
GREENBELT, MD--(Marketwire - June 23, 2009) - As with many other sectors in the US today,
state and local entities are moving quickly to find new and innovative ways
to use technology to increase effectiveness and reduce costs in meeting
community needs. With federal grant and stimulus dollars driving the race,
the challenge, notes Presidio Networked Solutions, Inc., is to ensure that
IT-focused funds are used practically, with the goal being to streamline
operational complexities, while conserving resources and reducing
operational costs.
To demonstrate this, Presidio, the leading provider of professional and
managed services for advanced IT
lifecycle solutions, cites its successful collaboration with the City
of West Palm Beach, Florida. The City looked to Presidio to expand and
restructure its network infrastructure and telephony systems, utilizing
virtualization for its New City Center project. At the front end of the
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 and telephone systems. 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. "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 our new
datacenter configuration, we were 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. The
servers are fully redundant, which enabled us 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 our
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, Inc. "I feel that, with our 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."
Among the many benefits of the City's virtualization network strategy are
considerable space and energy savings -- with only a few racks in each data
center. "While our initial investment was significant, the ROI was nearly
tenfold in total savings," said Osteen. "Additional long-term benefits
include consolidation of our 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. In the fallout of a recent major power outage
during a hurricane, in which the municipal generators failed, the City
relocated its Communications Center from its Emergency Operations Center to
the Police Department. "With the IP-based system, set-up at the PD took
mere hours instead of days -- and was reconfigured remotely from Phoenix,
which would have been impossible if we still relied on a PBX system," he
said.
Today, the City of West Palm Beach also benefits from virtualization
projects made possible by network infrastructure applications from Presidio
partners NetApp and VMware. "A reduction in servers and virtualization
tools, including VMware, is currently providing the City savings of over
$300,000 in physical servers and an additional $40,000 per year in power
consumption alone," said Osteen. "Deduplication solutions from NetApp have
reduced our overall data storage requirements by a full terabyte,
significantly reducing storage costs and easing the process of moving data
between servers. Additional savings are being realized from a datacenter
cooling design made possible by the City's continued collaboration with
Presidio, which directs the building's air management system to cool
critical servers and other rack-based equipment that need it -- rather than
paying to cool the entire datacenter."
"State and local governments around the country today are in a position to
replicate West Palm Beach's success with its major infrastructure
build-out," said Joel Schleicher, CEO of Presidio Networked Solutions.
"Grants and other stimulus-driven opportunities are available to help
entities undergo long-needed IT upgrades that provide a high return on
investment, while making possible a raft of new services. Presidio is
positioned to help find grants that will allow our customers to structure
their technology infrastructure for efficiency and scalability, enabling
them to overcome the limitations of legacy systems that are destined for
obsolescence."
As a trusted provider of professional and managed services to government
entities at every level, Presidio is well positioned to help government
organizations utilize IT-focused stimulus dollars prudently, with the goal
of improving their technology infrastructure and services. Additional
components of Presidio's lifecycle portfolio include Presidio Managed
Networks and Presidio Technology Capital. Presidio Managed Networks
enables companies to out-task their network and device management, allowing
IT personnel to focus on internal initiatives that will ultimately benefit
the business. Presidio Technology Capital assists businesses with the
financial aspects of procuring advanced technology solutions, providing
adaptable financial solutions that include capital preservation, predictive
technology refresh and flexible programs such as FAS 13 operating leases,
off-balance-sheet leasing, project financing and equipment decommissioning.
About Presidio Networked Solutions, Inc.
Presidio Networked Solutions, Inc., the leading provider of advanced IT lifecycle solutions, addresses the
complete technology lifecycle -- plan, design, integrate, operate and
optimize -- for the enterprise, commercial and government markets.
Presidio's comprehensive solutions portfolio comprises
unified communications, wireless, security, storage, network
infrastructure and managed services. Holding the highest networking
industry certifications from vendor partners Cisco, IBM, HP, Sun, EMC,
NetApp, VMware and Microsoft, Presidio Networked Solutions is
well-positioned to meet the growing needs of customers migrating to
advanced technologies. Presidio also offers customers an extensive range of
financing solutions, including leasing. For more information visit:
www.presidio.com.
Presidio Networked Solutions is a trademark of Presidio, Inc. Other trade
names used in this document are acknowledged to be the properties of their
respective owners.