When Henderson, Nev., initiated a $50-million project to expand its City Hall in 2000, Jim Wilson saw an opportunity to get ahead of the curve and move beyond piecemeal network upgrades and maintenance. By upgrading its core switches and transport infrastructure, the city would be able to accommodate expected growth and even have extra bandwidth and network intelligence to roll out new services to citizens and employees.
"Henderson is among the fastest-growing cities in the country," says Wilson, network manager for Henderson. "We've seen growth rates that few organizations have experienced, and it can be difficult to keep up with our citizens' needs from an IT standpoint."
The state of Nevada is experiencing soaring growth, and Henderson is setting the trend. Henderson's population grew by more than 10,000 in 2003 alone, to more than 225,000. The city's success places unique demands on its IT department, which provides support for every major civic service, from business licenses and swimming pool reservations to vital police and fire communications.
Henderson's main network campus includes the City Hall and data center, the justice facility with jail and courtrooms, police and fire departments, and the park and recreation departments. These locations are all attached to one another via single-mode blown fiber supplied by Sumitomo Electric Lightwave.
The network division started by upgrading the network's core switches, which were nearing the end of their lifespan, had limited expansion slots and bandwidth, and were becoming increasingly expensive to maintain. The budget for expanding City Hall's network equipment was $1.9 million, and Wilson was able to illustrate that it would provide a lower cost of ownership than trying to maintain the old network.
"Even though the new equipment required an initial cash outlay, we were able to package a pretty good deal with trade-ins, and buying all the equipment at once actually made it a pretty sound decision and investment," Wilson says.
INCREASE IN BANDWITH
The network division chose Cisco Systems' Catalyst 6500 Series switches, which provide up to 13 expansion slots and offer a tenfold increase in bandwidth, connecting sites at speeds up to 10 Gbps. A primary challenge was choosing a platform that would be available soon enough to meet a tight construction schedule, yet could scale to handle future needs.
"We knew our network would continue to expand, and we decided to standardize on Cisco switches for the main campus," explains Wilson. "With a standard, chassis-based platform, the blades and modules are interchangeable, and we can keep spare power supplies, chassis and blades on hand more readily, while reducing costs of spares."
To take advantage of the switches' speed, the city also invested $1.5 million to upgrade the City Hall's fiber and copper cable plant. These upgrades provide bandwidth support for 10 Gbps and higher. Cisco 7200 Series routers provide Internet and WAN connectivity for the core network. An additional 56 remote city sites, such as recreation centers, police and fire substations, senior centers, and other small offices, tie into the core network via ATM and T-1 lines with Cisco branch routers.
Critical city services like public safety require the highest possible reliability, so Wilson and his network staff engineered plenty of redundancy into the network.
"We designed a good deal of redundancy into our architecture to maximize availability," says Wilson. "Every edge device is dual-attached back to the core, and almost every server is dual-attached, as well. We have four Cisco Catalyst 6513 switches in the data center, so if one switch does go down, a backup immediately takes over. Another nice thing about the redundancy is that whenever we take equipment down for proactive maintenance, such as a firmware or software update, we can do it transparently. Users don't even know it happened."
"Our management tools enable our help desk to check traffic status, and also enable us to analyze utilization of specific links and perform long-range capacity planning," explains Wilson.
In a public safety emergency, the effectiveness of information systems can literally mean the difference between life and death. Wilson and his staff wanted to ensure that the city's public safety departments could benefit from the most advanced technologies available.
The Henderson Fire Department operates from nine stations, with 180 employees covering the city's 94 square miles and providing aid to surrounding areas. To extend network resources to the city's paramedics, the city has installed mobile data terminals (MDTs) in their vehicles, which can provide up-to-the-second emergency information.
"Our police and fire departments can connect to the network through CDMA wireless, which we've contracted through our local provider," says Wilson. "The MDTs can tell a paramedic on a call where the nearest hospital is and the available bed count for a specific medical situation, and provide details and distance to alternate sites."