City of Henderson, Nevada
City Government Cuts Administrative Costs by 50 Percent and Reduces Server Footprint by 75 Percent with Sun Fire T2000 ServersAs Nevada’s second largest city, the City of Henderson has grown into a community which is home to more than 250,000 residents. The City of Henderson has become one of the nation’s most dynamic communities and in 2006 was named one of the top 20 cities in America by MONEY Magazine’s annual “America’s Best Places to Live.” Customer Challenges
SolutionConsolidation of 16 older Sun servers to a platform of 6 Sun Fire T2000 CoolThreads servers with 8-core UltraSPARC T1 processors, 32 simultaneous processing threads and 16 GB memory. The free and open source Solaris 10 Operating System provided binary compatibility with the older version of the OS making the migration a simple process. Business Results
Story DetailsThe City of Henderson, Nevada has added an average of 12,000 new residents every year since 1990 and has been called the fastest-growing city in the U.S. That growth fosters economic opportunities and high living standards, but it also puts a strain on government services. The City of Henderson government has had to grow almost as fast as the city itself, and today has 2,400 employees, with an IT staff of 84. The city government has rapidly expanded its portfolio of applications and is using Oracle's PeopleSoft applications to keep human resources, performance management and financial operations running smoothly. To run the applications, the IT team installed a server farm with 16 Sun Fire V120 and 280R servers. However, those servers eventually began to run out of capacity and chew up administrative time. With budget constraints, hiring more engineers was out of the question. The team had to find a solution to reduce server complexity and the amount of staff attention needed for support.
"
We're so impressed with the performance and cost of the Sun Fire T2000 that we're adopting it as our standard platform for all Unix-based applications. A dozen more server consolidations are planned and they are all going on the T2000. There is no better choice for an organization like ours, which is facing unlimited growth while trying to reduce operating costs. It's a great solution for the budget and the environment.
"
— Ed Molina, Manager of Strategic Services, City of Henderson
Pleased with the Sun technology that had successfully run its enterprise applications and happy with Sun service, the City of Henderson tapped Sun for ideas on how it could streamline its server infrastructure. Fortunately, Sun had a revolutionary new approach that would drastically improve capacity and performance while halving server footprint and power and cooling costs. The Sun Fire T2000 server with CoolThreads technology—multithreaded processors that tripled throughput and reduced the size of the box—was designed to solve the city's dilemma. The city sampled the offering through the Sun Try and Buy Program and was immediately won over. The open source Solaris 10 Operating System, which offered Containers to secure the twenty-nine Peoplesoft ERP, development, test, quality and production environments hosted by the server, sealed the deal. The city bought six Sun Fire T2000 servers to consolidate the workloads of the older Sun Fire V120 and 280R servers, and migrated from Solaris 8 to Solaris 10 OS. Like the city’s population, the benefits have flowed in ever since. The Sun Fire T2000 server solution has cut CPU utilization by 50 percent, so there is plenty of capacity for the growing government’s IT needs. At the same time, administrative overhead for applications fell by 50 percent, or four hours per day, which enables the IT team to do more with the same number of employees and tackle some high-priority tasks that had been relegated to the back burner. Power and cooling have been reduced at least 50 percent, while the footprint of the six Sun Fire T2000 server has shrunk from four racks to one, or 75 percent. Users have called to say that performance in all the internal applications has improved, including faster batch runs for key financial operations. Since the applications were binary compatible with Solaris 10, the migration took place rapidly without disrupting users. The City of Henderson's IT team plans to implement Solaris 10 Containers to consolidate 12 more Sun Fire V120 and 280R servers in an additional 2 Sun Fire T2000 servers to run the Web sites. With the Sun Fire T2000 server, Sun has convinced the IT team that Sun technology makes the most sense for today and tomorrow. |
RelatedCustomer Accolades | |||||||||||||||||||
 |
| |||||||||||||||||||
