Miami-Dade County Private Cloud

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2013

Local government was faced with a huge challenge of replacing aging and out-of-warranty physical servers with a diminishing government budget. As a solution, the local government’s Information Technology Department used VMware server virtualization to design a local government Private Cloud. Miami-Dade County Private Cloud provides significant savings. With virtualization, the County increased the resource utilization of our underlying physical server hardware from 10% to 80% and reduced the physical footprint of processing hardware at major County data centers thru sharing physical resources. Our current infrastructure hosts 460 virtual servers running on 30 physical servers. ITD has been able to achieve an average consolidation ratio of 20 to 40 virtual servers per physical host. By not using a Private Cloud, the capital cost for 460 new servers would have cost approximately $2.6 million. The performance of virtual servers and their hosts are managed and monitored from a central location. ITD has reduced hardware and operating costs by 20% energy costs by 80%, with a savings of $3,000 per year for every server workload virtualized, and also provided decreased downtime and improved reliability for business continuity of Miami-Dade County departments.