Smart Future: City of Alexandria Lays Groundwork for Smart Cities Future

For the City of Alexandria, Virginia, which has won awards for environmental sustainability, virtualizing its data center was a logical step in reducing its overall impact on the environment as well as recurring costs for facilities, cooling, power, and hardware.

To pave the way toward the City’s networked future, Avaya is a critical partner in delivering the requisite agile network before the virtualization project gets off the ground.

The City, which serves approximately 150,000 residents, had a network that was reaching the end of its usefulness and needed a significant upgrade for the city to proceed with its virtualization and replication ambitions. After methodical evaluation, the Information Technology Services (ITS) team:

• Replaced the legacy network that lacked resilient routing capabilities, ran on a legacy spanning tree protocol, was not capable of supporting virtualization, and lacked bandwidth and stability to support heavy network traffic.

• Deployed a new architecture featuring the shortest path bridging (SPB) protocol, combined with a 10GB network to provide the necessary performance for the project, and support future growth.

The City chose the Avaya SPB-based Fabric Connect solution and Avaya Ethernet Series (ERS) switches as the backbone for the future. Benefits achieved include:

• Faster network response times and a simplified network structure.

• Cost avoidance by integrating with existing hardware, and eliminating the need to rip and replace across the board to implement the 10GB upgrade and the Fabric Connect network.

• A foundation for security upgrades. In the future, Alexandria will consider implementing security cameras for live streaming video on the network. It will be less complicated to configure with Fabric Connect, and the extra bandwidth will ensure that video runs smoothly.

“Based on our current network environment and structure, we could easily implement Avaya Fabric Connect into our existing environment without making huge changes,” explains, Steve Jones, Network Engineer, City of Alexandria.

“Avaya’s switches integrated nicely with what we had. This is the first step in our journey to a smart city initiative. Without Avaya as a platform, we really couldn’t entertain it." Informed, Kevin O’Shaughnessy, Network Division Chief, City of Alexandria.