In-Depth

Power Play at City Hall

The City of Minneapolis turns to Unisys Corp. for its solution to updating its infrastructure.

• By David Essex
• 04/01/2002

Having migrated from mainframes to Compaq Proliant servers amid Y2K preparation, the city decided in early 2001 to begin replacing those 90 servers with larger mainframe-class e-@ction ES7000 servers from Unisys Corp.

The goal: A more scalable, reliable and economical backbone for the emerging "virtual city."

With two ES7000s in production and perhaps three more planned, Chief Information Officer Karl Kaiser says he's already saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in hardware leases, software licenses and maintenance costs while adding Unisys-guaranteed five-nines (99.999 percent) availability for existing applications and future ones like wireless data entry.

Public Utility
Kaiser, a former Unisys employee, quickly decided on the ES7000 in January 2001 after reading Unisys' scalability and reliability claims. He knew his Windows NT 4.0 Compaqs couldn't provide the necessary uptime and manageability despite a decent reboot record. They were running at barely 25 percent of capacity, and IT tended to buy more to accommodate demand, which only exacerbated the support burden.

Admirable Efficiency
The ES7000, in contrast, proved to be an efficient powerhouse. After a demo at Unisys' office in Eagan, Minn., Kaiser and staff moved fast. By mid-year, Quality Assurance (QA) testing had begun.

The big question was whether Internet Information Server (IIS) 4.x and SQL Server 2000 applications could co-exist alongside Exchange 2000 inside the logical servers.

"There's always the risk that one application could impact another," says Ray Zabilla, the project manager and chief executive officer of contractor Bitsolutions LLC in White Bear Lake, Minn.

The two-month test went smoothly, but Zabilla says he learned an important lesson from it: Microsoft Datacenter Server must be closely managed.

The city bought a second, 8GB, 16-way ES7000 (four four-processor partitions) with Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Citrix MetaFrame XP for Windows to extend the life of 233- and 300MHz Pentium II desktops by running applications remotely on the server. That box will save $700,000 on leasing newer PCs, according to Jason Powell, director of Information and Technology Services Architecture.

Politics and Patch Jobs
The ES7000 rollout wasn't without minor bumps and roadblocks. An unrelated IP addressing problem on fire stations' DSL routers slowed deployment of a thin-client database until Cisco routers could be upgraded. And an early version of the server firmware required partitions to be powered up and shut down in an inconvenient order, but Unisys quickly installed a fix.

Microsoft's certification process for applications running on Datacenter Server has caused delays, as have brief hassles with third-party drivers. One prominent culprit: EMC Corp.'s Symmetrix network storage. Also, EMC's EDM tape-backup hardware had file-level conflicts with Windows before the Datacenter installation; resolving the EMC troubles caused an additional three-month holdup.

The city is looking into StorageTek and Veritas alternatives but has meanwhile settled for attaching Digital Linear Tape (DLT) drives directly to the ES7000s. "It's certainly not an enterprise solution, but it does provide some backup," says Troy Sprouls, a Unisys pre-sales executive.

Partitions needed tweaking. The city started with eight, four-way partitions, but Unisys determined two eight-ways (one with passive copies of applications in case of fail-over) would be more efficient for production servers, while two four-ways could hold active and passive applications undergoing QA.

The new configuration still leaves eight processors idle, but Zabilla says the server will be brought up to its maximum of two, 16-way partitions when the QA environment is moved (and processors added) to the second ES7000.

The city also gained economies of scale and easier management when Unisys performed a "rational consolidation" of the applications on a single instance of Datacenter Server. "It allowed them to add four additional processors to each of the two production machines," says Michael Finken, a Unisys technology consultant.

Virtual City of the Future
In addition to saving around $50,000 on Microsoft licenses for the 16 Compaq servers, Kaiser says he'll cut $20,000 for service technicians, who are paid union rates. "That's an annual number that you have to pay for people who are on-call, whether they come in or not," he says.

Now, the city can more easily manage computing resources itself with bundled software that Unisys re-packages from NetIQ Corp.

For example, the software lets IT define parameters for particular applications, then automatically re-deploys processing power during demand peaks, such as in the morning when people check overnight e-mail. "If Exchange isn't doing much, those processors are freed up for something else," Powell explains.

In addition, a Windows 2000 PC-on-a-card inside each server is dedicated to monitoring conditions and sending automatic alerts. And Windows 2000 Terminal Services lets technicians perform most maintenance tasks remotely, including changing the BIOS.

Anecdotal evidence (not to mention SQL Server and Exchange load-simulation results) point to performance improvements, but Kaiser says current and likely future applications aren't transaction intensive and won't tax the system. The primary benefits, he says, are better availability, scalability and management.

The shiny new infrastructure brings Minneapolis into the front ranks of the "e-government" movement that is also sweeping the federal and state governments.

Kaiser says the need for such guaranteed 24x7 access is more acute at the municipal level.

"The states are where the rubber meets the sky, and the cities are where the rubber meets the road," he says. "We have a much closer relationship with the citizens."