1. Snohomish County, Wash., also has been benefitting
from virtualization and consolidation while building to
a private cloud environment. Before virtualization, it
was taking the IT team 3 to 6 weeks to deploy
servers for applications that clients requested. They
also had approximately 300 servers to maintain and
were only using 15 to 20 percent of each server’s
capacity.
The IT department began implementing virtualization
in 2008 as a pilot for a few projects, which justified
the investment, says Michael Cruz, Enterprise
Technology Architect for Snohomish County. They
then began adding more virtual machines, gradually
switching volunteers to the new environment, using
Hyper-V to section off the servers to more fully use
the available capacity. They also used System Center
Virtual Machine Manager to convert physical servers
to virtual servers.
Since then, the department has consolidated nearly
200 data centers to nine and have saved money by
reducing the cost of physical servers by two-thirds
and minimizing licensing costs. It also now takes 30
to 60 minutes to provision a new server, instead of
up to six weeks. “Customer service has improved
dramatically,” Cruz says. “We aren’t a bottleneck
anymore.”
The department currently is at 80 percent
virtualization and plans to extend this to most of its
existing environment, using Hyper-V for all new
servers. They also are working on automating their
back-end to move into private cloud. “The consolidation side builds to private cloud,” Cruz says. “We are
slicing and dicing the data center more. We want to be able to instead of provisioning out a whole server
[for an application], have smaller, multiple instances of it. Also with private cloud, we are thinking about
databases, not using a whole database for a department, but carving that out in a more fair fashion.”
Moving to the private cloud takes time and requires forethought, but some local governments, including
Holden Beach, already are benefiting. When Hurricane Irene hit the East Coast in 2011, David Hewett —
along with other residents — evacuated the island for 36 hours. He relocated to the off-island emergency
center where he sat down with a laptop and continued to provide residents with updated information about
the situation. “We can still have a virtual town hall via the cloud that can run operations and provide
information even if we aren’t set up at the physical town hall,” Hewett says. “If Irene had been much worse,
we could have raised our American flag off the island and conducted business as usual.”
Jennifer Grzeskowiak is an Orange County-based freelance writer.
Michael Cruz
than the city having to pay a public works employee overtime to come out and do the same job. This sharing
of duties across departments is crucial to the small beach town that operates with a small staff.
“Most of the customers going to private cloud architecture typically aren’t doing so for a specific application or
purpose, but as a generally different way of running a data center,” says Keith Olinger, director for Microsoft’s
State and Local Government Infrastructure Sales. “In that process they are trying to realize efficiencies and
thus cost savings by consolidating servers and data centers, and trying to step up the delivery of applications
to customers.”
Private cloud, single organization
Private cloud is much like the public or external cloud — offsite hosts that share information with multiple
tenants — but is operated for a single organization. It can be managed internally or by a third party and
hosted internally or externally. Local governments can benefit from private cloud in a variety of ways,
including security, customization and scalability. Organizations typically use a combination of public and
private cloud. Olinger says he often sees public cloud being used for e-mail and private cloud used for other
applications where data is more sensitive.
Building to private cloud doesn’t happen overnight and begins with server virtualization, which offers its own
benefits, but Olinger is quick to point out that individual virtualization technologies are tactical decisions, not
strategic. Organizations have to determine how they will be assembled together. “When you consolidate to
one data center but don’t have the private cloud architecture, you are missing out on savings and still have
too much hardware,” Olinger says.
Milwaukee is one local government that began with virtualization and now is moving to private cloud. Several
years ago, the central IT department started virtualizing its servers to cut down on maintenance and
replacement costs and later adopted Hyper-V technology, part of Windows Server 2008 R2, a cloud-
optimized server operating system. Pao Vang, project leader, IT and Management Division, says they were
attracted to the live migration aspects of Hyper-V that allow them to switch virtual machines between physical
hosts for maintenance without interrupting users. They also are using the Microsoft System Center suite of
products, including virtual machine manager, configuration manager and operation manager.
Over the years, the department has reduced more than 100 physical servers at one point down to six. Vang
says they save time by only having to do maintenance on six physical servers and it takes the virtual servers
half the time to reboot. They plan to continue their consolidation efforts and expand to include other city
departments.
The IT department also is now moving to private cloud for disaster recovery and redundancy purposes for its
own systems. That will require expanding the virtualization that the department began several years ago and
deploying additional storage that they have already purchased. The virtual servers allow the department to
back up the servers off-site or move them to a virtual server host. “When you have the different virtual
servers you have the flexibility of moving any application back and forth,” Vang says. “You aren’t just limited
to e-mail or web pages for failover; it can be databases or anything else.” The city is starting with a few
applications and then will consider extending to all critical applications.
As far as the public cloud, they are looking at Microsoft 365 for e-mail and Office in the Microsoft cloud.
Employees will be able to go to any computer and access all of their data, folders and e-mail that they can
access at work.
When hurricane winds would begin to blow, that used
to mean it was time for Holden Beach, N.C., town
employees to physically load their servers onto a
truck and head to an inland location three miles
away. Once there, they would have to unload the
servers and reboot them before resuming operations.
Not only was this burdensome, but it also delayed
communications with residents, visitors and absentee
property owners wanting information regarding the
storm.
Turning to the private cloud has changed all of that.
When David Hewett took over as town manager in
2008, he decided to hire a third-party vendor to host
all IT and communications operations virtually at a
secure, off-island location. “Now it’s a matter of
driving across the bridge, opening the door and
turning the lights on,” Hewett says.
While private cloud has helped Holden Beach
improve its IT and communications during hurricanes,
Hewett has seen other benefits as well. In addition to
saving money by eliminating server maintenance
costs — an estimated $55,000 per year — city
employees have found unintended ways to relate
across departments. For instance, water pipes often
freeze and break during the winter, setting off an
alarm indicating a leak. Since many homes are
secondary properties for the owners, the police
department employees on patrol are now notified of
the leak and will stop and turn off the water, rather
David Hewett
Building Their Way to the Private Cloud
Cities and counties test the cloud’s benefits, privacy and security
By Jennifer Grzeskowiak
Virtualization first, cloud next
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![Snohomish County, Wash., also has been benefitting
from virtualization and consolidation while building to
a private cloud environment. Before virtualization, it
was taking the IT team 3 to 6 weeks to deploy
servers for applications that clients requested. They
also had approximately 300 servers to maintain and
were only using 15 to 20 percent of each server’s
capacity.
The IT department began implementing virtualization
in 2008 as a pilot for a few projects, which justified
the investment, says Michael Cruz, Enterprise
Technology Architect for Snohomish County. They
then began adding more virtual machines, gradually
switching volunteers to the new environment, using
Hyper-V to section off the servers to more fully use
the available capacity. They also used System Center
Virtual Machine Manager to convert physical servers
to virtual servers.
Since then, the department has consolidated nearly
200 data centers to nine and have saved money by
reducing the cost of physical servers by two-thirds
and minimizing licensing costs. It also now takes 30
to 60 minutes to provision a new server, instead of
up to six weeks. “Customer service has improved
dramatically,” Cruz says. “We aren’t a bottleneck
anymore.”
The department currently is at 80 percent
virtualization and plans to extend this to most of its
existing environment, using Hyper-V for all new
servers. They also are working on automating their
back-end to move into private cloud. “The consolidation side builds to private cloud,” Cruz says. “We are
slicing and dicing the data center more. We want to be able to instead of provisioning out a whole server
[for an application], have smaller, multiple instances of it. Also with private cloud, we are thinking about
databases, not using a whole database for a department, but carving that out in a more fair fashion.”
Moving to the private cloud takes time and requires forethought, but some local governments, including
Holden Beach, already are benefiting. When Hurricane Irene hit the East Coast in 2011, David Hewett —
along with other residents — evacuated the island for 36 hours. He relocated to the off-island emergency
center where he sat down with a laptop and continued to provide residents with updated information about
the situation. “We can still have a virtual town hall via the cloud that can run operations and provide
information even if we aren’t set up at the physical town hall,” Hewett says. “If Irene had been much worse,
we could have raised our American flag off the island and conducted business as usual.”
Jennifer Grzeskowiak is an Orange County-based freelance writer.
Michael Cruz
than the city having to pay a public works employee overtime to come out and do the same job. This sharing
of duties across departments is crucial to the small beach town that operates with a small staff.
“Most of the customers going to private cloud architecture typically aren’t doing so for a specific application or
purpose, but as a generally different way of running a data center,” says Keith Olinger, director for Microsoft’s
State and Local Government Infrastructure Sales. “In that process they are trying to realize efficiencies and
thus cost savings by consolidating servers and data centers, and trying to step up the delivery of applications
to customers.”
Private cloud, single organization
Private cloud is much like the public or external cloud — offsite hosts that share information with multiple
tenants — but is operated for a single organization. It can be managed internally or by a third party and
hosted internally or externally. Local governments can benefit from private cloud in a variety of ways,
including security, customization and scalability. Organizations typically use a combination of public and
private cloud. Olinger says he often sees public cloud being used for e-mail and private cloud used for other
applications where data is more sensitive.
Building to private cloud doesn’t happen overnight and begins with server virtualization, which offers its own
benefits, but Olinger is quick to point out that individual virtualization technologies are tactical decisions, not
strategic. Organizations have to determine how they will be assembled together. “When you consolidate to
one data center but don’t have the private cloud architecture, you are missing out on savings and still have
too much hardware,” Olinger says.
Milwaukee is one local government that began with virtualization and now is moving to private cloud. Several
years ago, the central IT department started virtualizing its servers to cut down on maintenance and
replacement costs and later adopted Hyper-V technology, part of Windows Server 2008 R2, a cloud-
optimized server operating system. Pao Vang, project leader, IT and Management Division, says they were
attracted to the live migration aspects of Hyper-V that allow them to switch virtual machines between physical
hosts for maintenance without interrupting users. They also are using the Microsoft System Center suite of
products, including virtual machine manager, configuration manager and operation manager.
Over the years, the department has reduced more than 100 physical servers at one point down to six. Vang
says they save time by only having to do maintenance on six physical servers and it takes the virtual servers
half the time to reboot. They plan to continue their consolidation efforts and expand to include other city
departments.
The IT department also is now moving to private cloud for disaster recovery and redundancy purposes for its
own systems. That will require expanding the virtualization that the department began several years ago and
deploying additional storage that they have already purchased. The virtual servers allow the department to
back up the servers off-site or move them to a virtual server host. “When you have the different virtual
servers you have the flexibility of moving any application back and forth,” Vang says. “You aren’t just limited
to e-mail or web pages for failover; it can be databases or anything else.” The city is starting with a few
applications and then will consider extending to all critical applications.
As far as the public cloud, they are looking at Microsoft 365 for e-mail and Office in the Microsoft cloud.
Employees will be able to go to any computer and access all of their data, folders and e-mail that they can
access at work.
When hurricane winds would begin to blow, that used
to mean it was time for Holden Beach, N.C., town
employees to physically load their servers onto a
truck and head to an inland location three miles
away. Once there, they would have to unload the
servers and reboot them before resuming operations.
Not only was this burdensome, but it also delayed
communications with residents, visitors and absentee
property owners wanting information regarding the
storm.
Turning to the private cloud has changed all of that.
When David Hewett took over as town manager in
2008, he decided to hire a third-party vendor to host
all IT and communications operations virtually at a
secure, off-island location. “Now it’s a matter of
driving across the bridge, opening the door and
turning the lights on,” Hewett says.
While private cloud has helped Holden Beach
improve its IT and communications during hurricanes,
Hewett has seen other benefits as well. In addition to
saving money by eliminating server maintenance
costs — an estimated $55,000 per year — city
employees have found unintended ways to relate
across departments. For instance, water pipes often
freeze and break during the winter, setting off an
alarm indicating a leak. Since many homes are
secondary properties for the owners, the police
department employees on patrol are now notified of
the leak and will stop and turn off the water, rather
David Hewett
Building Their Way to the Private Cloud
Cities and counties test the cloud’s benefits, privacy and security
By Jennifer Grzeskowiak
Virtualization first, cloud next
You received this email because you have an existing business relationship with American City &; County, a division of
Penton Media. Periodically, we will inform you of special shows, products and other offers that we believe you will find
helpful in your business or career. To STOP receiving promotional e-mails from American City &; County, please click
here to opt-out.
American City &; County | Penton Media | 249 W. 17th Street | New York, NY 10011 | Privacy Statement](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/bd5fca9f-cecc-4a90-91b0-1f32b5950c8c-150930150342-lva1-app6891/85/Microsoft_SpecialReport-1-320.jpg)
