Town of Brookline Consolidates Information Infrastructure With EMC

EMC Corporation announced that Brookline, a Massachusetts town of nearly 60,000 residents that borders Boston, has centralized its information storage and server infrastructure using EMC storage, software and services. The consolidated infrastructure is providing the Town with easier manageability and availability of its growing information assets.

Kevin Stokes, Town of Brookline’s Chief Information Officer, said: "Over the years, our IT environment grew with departments purchasing their own servers and applications and our network evolving to connect it all together. With tightening budgets, we realized this was an excellent opportunity to collapse the overall architecture and drive economies of scale to increase performance, scalability and reliability to meet the requirements of our new and more-demanding applications."

Brookline has a number of resource-intensive applications and makes a wide variety of information available to residents. The town analyzes this data to generate property value assessments and tax invoices. To manage the volume of information and complexity of its applications, the town consolidated its disparate storage residing on an EMC CLARiiON CX3 and 45 Hewlett-Packard servers onto an EMC CLARiiON CX4 networked storage system for financial management, email, Microsoft SQL Server, geographic information systems (GIS), energy management, Microsoft Office and school administration. This system is managed, monitored and configured using EMC Navisphere software.

Additionally, to consolidate its 45 physical servers, the Town of Brookline’s IT department deployed VMware virtualization software and runs virtual machines with information stored on the CLARiiON. When the virtualization project is completed, the number of physical servers is expected to be reduced by 50 percent even as the town adds four or five new applications.

"This architecture has helped us lower our support costs and saved money on our budget," said Stokes. "By allocating new servers as virtual machines stored on the EMC CLARiiON, we avoided purchasing 11 physical servers, which is not only a substantial capital investment, but would create additional complexity in our environment. These savings will grow as we add another 29 physical and virtual servers by end of year."

EMC Global Services provided initial analysis of the town’s environment and assisted with design and implementation of the new CLARiiON infrastructure.

"In addition, it used to take at least half a day to get a server set up and functioning, which is now done in minutes with virtual machines. We can also allocate storage on the fly to accommodate our users’ requirements. And with a smaller, more efficient server and storage environment, we’re also spending less on energy to power our infrastructure."