1. Technical Case Study
How the City of Melrose
Reached the Clouds with
VMware on NetApp FlexPod
Abstract This case study, written by Pazos and occurred. The fire department needed
Located approximately seven miles Colby Cousens, technical manager of mobile data terminals and GPS tracking,
north of Boston, Melrose is a small the city of Melrose, describes how a and the police launched a crime analy-
city with a population of about 28,000. NetApp® FlexPod® deployment enabled sis program with a back-end database
Since its settlement in the 18th century, this small Victorian town in Massa- and automatic license plate reader that
Melrose has offered residents a desir- chusetts to connect 18 sites with a required storing thousands of images.
able compromise between a crowded regionalized private cloud that delivers We also had to make room for recording
metropolis and rural Massachusetts. services to more than 300 municipali- all phone calls to public safety dispatch.
Predominantly residential, with exqui- ties. The regional IT blueprint developed Adding more than two dozen security
site Victorian homes dating from the by Pazos was prominently featured in cameras throughout the city required
late 1800s, the city has a long-standing the Commonwealth of Massachusetts 8TB of disk alone. We weren’t confident
tradition of self-sufficiency, with excel- regionalization plan for IT (www.mass. in the reliability of our communications
lent schools and cultural attractions. gov/governor/regional). infrastructure, yet over 30 departments
in more than 20 buildings depended on
However, the city’s IT infrastructure Business Context it for daily operations.
had become outdated. To achieve the In the fall of 2009, Melrose’s IT depart-
growth and sustainability necessary for ment was managing a mix of 20 HP We began to focus on five key areas
a more promising future, Chief Infor- and Dell servers locally and another 25 of concern:
mation Officer Jorge Pazos began to spread throughout the schools. Each
The age and dependability of our
investigate what innovations were pos- server had its own individual tape-
switching/link speed between build-
sible within IT that could leverage exist- based storage drive. Not only were we
ings. The switching equipment in
ing technology investments yet find running out of space in our server room,
place was nearing end of life, and
new ways to generate revenue. but also a tangle of cables was con-
buildings were all connected to it
necting everything together, and power
Ultimately, Pazos was inspired to create with a coaxial I-NET maintained by
and cooling resources were stressed.
a regional IT center that could deliver Comcast. As a result, our network—
Organizational challenges and daily
value-added services to several towns and in turn our productivity—was
maintenance tasks were overwhelm-
and cities surrounding Melrose by shar- affected by the weather. Without true
ing. For example, we had to physically
ing resources. The new model would ownership of the infrastructure, we
change tapes and move them off-site to
decrease costs and accelerate growth, had to rely on Comcast for diagnosis
secure our backups.
while enabling reinvestment of unused and repair.
funds in programs for the citizens of At the same time, an explosion of inter- The rate of increase in our storage
Massachusetts. est in technology and demands on IT demands. A newer generation of

2. Figure 1) Configuring backups in vSphere with NetApp VSC.
workers brought a strong interest in did the need to house equipment in a solidating equipment that was previ-
technology, and a desire to imple- secure, central location with network ously duplicated in multiple locations.
ment numerous products required access and adequate power and
additional data center resources. cooling to protect it. Looking toward We turned to ePlus Technologies for
Products were sometimes purchased the future, it was apparent that the a recommendation on a data center
without a full understanding of the cost of expansion in our facility would solution allowing us to bring our exist-
costs associated with their deploy- become a burden equal to those we ing data, equipment, and services
ment. Storage and backups were already faced with procurement and more efficiently into a single location.
somewhat dispersed and therefore support of the equipment itself. The initial deployment was to fulfill our
not entirely reliable, and many of needs internally and provide a basis
the database applications required Meanwhile, budgets for state and local for the service of city and school tech-
a level of performance that was governments around the country are nology requirements but had to scale
hard to achieve given the resources under a great deal of pressure. As a and support the vision of a municipal
and funding we could expect on an result, both state and local govern- cloud that could host the same for any
annual basis. ments have taken a fairly aggressive of the surrounding cities and towns in
Disorganized use of compute approach to squeezing out efficiencies, Massachusetts.
resources and support agreements. sharing costs, and regionalizing ser-
vices. All of those factors prompted us The project began with the consolida-
In a rush to deploy services, some tion of two technology departments
servers became overloaded, while to explore how we could consolidate
operations intelligently. between the city and the schools and
others ran almost idle. The percent- building in dedicated fiber to connect
age of equipment with four-hour sup- As a first step to creating a workable all of the buildings back to a central
port was not large enough to handle shared infrastructure, we initiated core switch. Next, we consolidated the
all the critical applications our depart- the development of a private cloud, server infrastructure. ePlus introduced
ment was required to manage. which provides the flexibility, scal- us to NetApp FlexPod, a predesigned
Duplication of equipment and effort. ability, and security required to deliver base configuration built on the Cisco
Technologically, the city’s infrastruc- a broad set of services efficiently and Unified Computing System™ (Cisco
ture was divided into various areas: cost-effectively. UCS®), Cisco Nexus® data center
independent head ends, network switches, NetApp FAS storage compo-
cores, storage, and backup between New Infrastructure nents, and a range of software partners.
city and school departments. Equip- The opportunity arose in Melrose to FlexPod is a baseline configuration, but
ment purchasing, support, and com- upgrade the city’s network infrastruc- also has the flexibility to be sized and
mon maintenance tasks were often ture; we replaced an aging, unreliable optimized to accommodate many dif-
duplicated, simply because of the system with high-speed fiber optic ferent use cases. It would allow us to
way our infrastructure had been laid links to 33 departments in 23 buildings increase capacity rapidly without having
out over the years. within a land area of 4.8 square miles. to rip and replace expensive equipment
No room to expand. As demand for This upgrade allowed us to begin con- down the road.
services and support increased, so

3. Figure 2) FAS2040
FlexPod for VMware® is built on the blade server system and is mirrored in in production out of three active tenants
FlexPod infrastructure stack with a redundant configuration in case of on FlexPod. All of our critical apps run
added VMware components, including equipment failure. Twinax cabling con- on this system, including Microsoft®
VMware vSphere® and vCenter™ for vir- nects the 6120 to Cisco Nexus 2100 SQL Server®, our financial system, Web
tualized application workloads. fabric extenders in the Cisco UCS 5100 servers, domain controllers, police
blade chassis. We currently run two dispatch, and Microsoft Exchange
Compute Environment B250 M1 blades with 96GB of RAM 2010. Test environments are not dif-
A Cisco Nexus 7010 provides core apiece and are in the process of install- ficult to configure, and we make use of
routing at the data center in City Hall. ing an additional blade. the infrastructure for this purpose as
Having all of our links passing through well. We maintain one physical domain
this core NetApp agile data infra- VMware
controller with all of our essential
structure provided a pivotal storage The blade server connects to our stor- management tools in case of failure or
resource for segmenting, securing, and age environment on the back end, and downtime.
deduplicating a diversity of data. This the VMware hypervisor and manage-
combined with virtualization technology ment software sits on top, allowing NetApp
from VMware allowed the city to further us to configure and administer virtual Our deployment currently consists of
reduce operational costs by consolidat- machines. There is a strong integra- a FAS2040 dual-controller HA con-
ing compute resources onto Cisco UCS tion with both Cisco UCS servers and figuration with two shelves and a Fibre
B250 M1 blade servers. NetApp storage through the vSphere Channel–connected DS14MK4 and
client. NetApp provides a virtual stor- SAS-connected DS4243 for a total of
Cisco age console plug-in for vSphere that 12TB of space (see Figure 2). Plans
The core of our network routes through allows us to configure backups, mir- exist to add a FAS2240 and cascade
a Cisco Nexus 7010 with 32 single- roring, and alerts very quickly from the FAS2040 to a disaster recovery
mode fiber optic small form-factor plug- the same interface, where we perform location we are in the process of popu-
gables (SFPs) and multiple virtual routing most daily tasks with virtual servers and lating to completely support the primary
tables to securely segment networking desktops (see Figure 1). site in the event of failure or service
access and keep data center tenants interruption.
separate. Connections pass directly into The organizational structure of our vir-
their respective tenancies using VLANs tual environment in the vSphere client Significant storage management is
or individual physical connections, makes it easy to denote servers, virtual provided through the vSphere client,
but no tenant has access to another’s desktops, and infrastructure virtual but NetApp OnCommand® System
resources using the network. Server traf- machines or appliances across multiple Manager is a very popular tool in our
fic passes through VLANs on a 10GB tenants and assign management per- data center as well. Our shelves are a
link through a data center switch into the missions using role-based access. We mix of SAS and SATA disks, and we
Cisco UCS 6120XP fabric interconnect. are currently running close to 40 virtual tier our storage based on performance
This device provides all the management servers and have deployed about 30 requirements. CIFS shares sit in an
and configuration for the Cisco UCS thin clients that access virtual desktops aggregate full of dedicated SATA disks,

4. Figure 3) Example dedupe rate on a small virtual machine datastore.
while VMDKs and database LUNs get other equipment to arrive. It was helpful participated in the deployment as part
the higher performance SAS drives. to have the freedom to deploy parts of of a training program to gain familiar-
Storage efficiency is extremely valu- the solution and begin to migrate our ity with the equipment and processes
able, and we use it extensively, observ- environment on a flexible schedule as it required to manage the system. Cisco
ing up to 67% deduplication on virtual aligned with maintenance windows. provided training credits, and during
machine datastores (see Figure 3). the third week of deployment, Cisco
Week 1: NetApp FAS2040 Installation
offered a data center training course
Thin provisioning adds some breathing The physical racking and cabling of the focusing on Cisco UCS blade server
room as well, allowing us to overcom- hardware and integration of our envi- management. The removal of old serv-
mit volumes to meet application system ronment took two days. Another two ers and cabling significantly decreased
requirements and monitor and alert days were spent configuring software data center footprint and power
when actual physical size approaches and installing management clients. At consumption.
limits. We manage our storage tightly; this point we began to migrate storage
flexible volumes with autogrow configu- to the iSCSI volumes and CIFS shares. Week 7: Training and Familiarity
rations and detailed alerts on abnormal ePlus stayed on after the deploy-
Weeks 2–3: Cisco Switching
rates of increase allow us this luxury. ment to help the technical staff gain
A system like this really highlights the As we implemented FlexPod, we familiarity with our new private cloud.
inefficiencies of storage in a direct- installed our new fiber optic network, Administration of a virtual environment
attached scenario (see Figures 4 and 5). replacing all core switching and deploy- was new here, but participation in the
ing a number of Cisco® edge solutions deployment and valuable instruction
With FlexPod in place, the city of Mel- to bring buildings onto the new net- that followed brought our team up to
rose can act as a managed service work. ePlus set up multiple VRFs and speed quickly. Nearing two years post-
provider, delivering IT infrastructure VLANs on our Cisco Nexus 7010 core implementation, our staff members are
and applications to nearby towns. By router to separate internal network traf- as comfortable with the new infrastruc-
regionalizing IT infrastructure, the city fic from the traffic generated by the ture as they ever were with the legacy
of Melrose will save the county a lot school department. infrastructure.
of money. The town of Essex, about
Weeks 4–6: Cisco UCS
25 miles away, has already reduced IT Current Use Cases
Implementation and Training
expenditures by about 33%. Melrose With FlexPod in place, the city of Mel-
Installing and getting the Cisco UCS
has reduced costs by 40% annually. rose can act as a managed service
blade server system online took about
two weeks. ePlus performed all of the provider, delivering IT infrastructure and
Implementation Process
installation and configuration of ESXi™ applications to nearby towns. In early
Our storage needs were more critical October 2011, the city signed its first
than other parts of the FlexPod design servers as well as the Cisco UCS ser-
vice profile creation. Physical-to-virtual regional partner, Essex, Massachusetts.
at the time we were considering it. By outsourcing its IT services to the city
ePlus technologies put our FAS2040 (P2V) conversions of our existing serv-
ers brought them into the new virtual of Melrose, it is anticipated that Essex
in place right away while we waited for will reduce IT costs by 33% annually.
environment. Technical staff in Melrose

5. Figure 5) VMFS datastore overprovisioned.
Figure 4) aggr0 157% committed with
25% still available.
Meanwhile, Melrose has reduced costs of remote locations. The schools in Best Practices
by 40% annually. Melrose served as our first multi-ten- Following are best practices we have
ancy pilot and allowed us to leverage learned from our own experience
Following are the current use cases the benefits of internal communication, implementing a FlexPod architecture:
for the FlexPod solution in the city of and the close proximity to test and
Melrose and surrounding partners: gain feedback we could apply to future Mix SAS and SATA disk shelves and
Internal Hosting and Services deployments. Our user base consists manage your data according to per-
of about 3,700 students and 1,000 formance requirements to save cost.
Our data center hosts all the files and
staff members. About 1,300 worksta- Consider Flash Cache or Flash pool-
services for roughly 300 internal users.
tions use the network daily to access ing to accelerate read and write times
All file storage resides in CIFS shares
resources in our cloud. We have since on less expensive disks.
on the SAN. Virtual machines serve
added a tenancy for the town of Essex, Build virtual templates. P2V conver-
domain services, applications, and
Massachusetts, and currently host both sions help to quickly migrate your
database products to all city depart-
files and virtual servers for the local environment onto new infrastructure,
ments, from engineering to public
government of an 8,0000-citizen com- but virtual machines deployed from a
safety. We manage and deploy virtual
munity. A consolidated infrastructure single template that was developed
machines through the VMware vSphere
and economies of scale allow us to in a virtual environment achieve much
client and storage using NetApp
reduce IT costs and improve the level of higher deduplication rates.
OnCommand System Manager.
service for all partners involved.
Public-Facing External Resources
Many of the services performed by SOLUTION COMPONENTS
city employees offer resources for the
NetApp Products NetApp FilerView®
community’s citizens, such as assess-
NetApp FAS storage systems Management Software
ing or inspecting data, GIS mapping
online, permitting online, recreation NetApp Data ONTAP® 8 NetApp FlexClone®
program enrollment, Web sites, NetApp Snapshot™ NetApp RAID-DP®
blogs, and other social media. Those NetApp SnapMirror ®
NetApp Rapid Cloning Utility
resources are hosted out of our data
NetApp FlexVol ®
NetApp vFiler®
center and help to provide information,
enjoyment, and efficiencies to help NetApp Thin Provisioning NetApp Snap Creator™
members of the community operate NetApp Deduplication NetApp DFM
comfortably and effectively. NetApp MultiStore® NetApp SnapRestore
Multi-Tenancy and Municipal Cloud NetApp SnapManager ®
NetApp Flash Cache
The FlexPod architecture allows us to for Virtual Infrastructure
provision resources securely and host Protocols
NetApp Virtual Storage Console 2.0 NFS, CIFS
files and virtual machines for a number

6. “We are reinventing the way local
government does business in the state
of Massachusetts. This will enable us
to speed the delivery of IT services,
generate new revenue streams, and
reinvest profit in programs for the citizens
of Massachusetts.”
Jorge Pazos
Chief Information Officer for City of Melrose
Maintain a backup physical machine
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
that is accessible remotely and
has all of your management tools Jorge Pazos Colby Cousens
installed. You should be able to con- Chief Information Officer, Technical Manager,
nect to this machine using VPN and City of Melrose, Massachusetts City of Melrose, Massachusetts
investigate any e-mail alerts or other Jorge Pazos is a public sector Colby Cousens has studied Business
concerns about your virtual infra- CIO, with 17 years of experience, and Computer Information Sciences
structure at any time. interested in emerging technologies at Bentley University and Boston
For More Information and their application in education University. He has been involved in a
and government. He is always number of startup projects and sits
Read the business brief:
striving to change the “business as on the board of directors for a small
http://www.netapp.com/us/company/
usual” mindset and is recognized as Boston-based corporation. With over
our-story/customer-showcase/city-of-
a leading figure in the drive to reduce eight years of experience in Munici-
melrose.html
government expenditures through pal IT, he has contributed to several
Learn more about city of Melrose: the effective use of technology. online publications, including Cisco
http://www.cityofmelrose.org Pazos has been quoted in numerous Blogs, and regularly pursues testing
industry and business publications, and pilot opportunities for unreleased
Learn about ePlus: and market-leading technology.
including a CIO Magazine white
http://www.eplus.com
paper and the Boston Globe. He
Read more about FlexPod: also speaks at industry conferences,
www.netapp.com/flexpod including the METAA/COSN CIO
Cloud Conference and GovTech’s
Find out how NetApp can help you build Digital Government Summit
a private cloud or buy cloud services: conference.
www.netapp.com/cloud
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