Cisco-based network revamp could save state up to $12 million annually
The state of Oregon is embarking on a data center consolidation and virtualization project that officials say will save $10 million to $12 million per year.
The project, which costs $43 million, was started in 2005 with the construction of a new data center in Salem, the state capital, in which 11 separate state agency data centers serving 45,000 employees will be consolidated. The project is scheduled to conclude in June 2009 with a new Gigabit Ethernet backbone and virtual circuits replacing a frame relay network to support new applications and a converged infrastructure.
It will mark the first time Oregon has standardized its data center and network infrastructure architectures as well.
“Going to a shared service infrastructure for IT was going to significantly reduce costs, as well as standardize the environment which is going to improve quality,” says Mark Reyer, administrator of the Oregon State Data Center (SDC). “It will improve the cycle time and agility of the application programming efforts to be able to develop on standard platforms.”
Reyer spent 15 years with IBM directing the company’s data center outsourcing and consolidation business for Fortune 500 clients such as Allied-Signal and United Technologies. With the Oregon SDC, Reyer is also looking to drive energy efficiency and carbon emission reduction — state managers expect to reduce power consumption by 30%, with an additional 25% reduction upon completion of server consolidation.
The data centers to be converted under the program belong to 11 state agencies, including Administrative Services, Consumer and Business Services, Corrections, Employment, Forestry, Housing and Community Services, Human Services, Oregon
State Police, Revenue, Transportation and Veterans’ Affairs.
Oregon is standardizing on Cisco Catalyst 6500 and 3750 switches, 7200 and 2800 series routers (compare router products), and MDS storage area network switches. The state is also implementing Cisco firewall, intrusion detection/prevention and network access control products.
Oregon has no plans thus far to implement Cisco’s VFrame Data center orchestration product, which was introduced along with Cisco’s Data Center 3.0 strategy last summer. Customers have been slow to adopt VFrame and Data Center 3.0 have been slow to adopt to date. Data Center 3.0 is centered on virtualizing and orchestrating server, storage and network provisioning resources to achieve cost and resource-provisioning efficiencies.
“We’re evaluating a lot of the data center newer releases but we’re not [implementing them] at this point,” says Al Grapoli, network systems manager at the SDC.
The project involves 1,520 servers, 425 terabytes of SAN storage, two 1,200 MIPS mainframes, 50,000 network devices, 225 Unix and 50 AS/400 midrange processors, and 7,000 switches and routers. Within the new data center, rows of servers and storage devices will be interconnected via 10 Gigabit Ethernet, while Gigabit Ethernet will connect resources within each row.
Externally, up to 30,000 T-1 frame relay circuits in a hub-and-spoke configuration will be replaced with Ethernet virtual circuits in a range of speeds from 5M to 100Mbps, officials say. Oregon is looking to Qwest and its Metro Optical Ethernet service to fulfill this requirement, Grapoli says.
Oregon is also looking to have several statewide hubs instead of just one in Salem.
“Right now everything homes here at the data center so we’d like to distribute that out further,” Grapoli says.
Some of the state’s larger agency locations will have direct 100Mbps Ethernet fiber links to the new Gigabit Ethernet backbone ring, Grapoli says. Portland, meanwhile, will have 622Mbps OC-12 connections between offices.
Within Salem, state agencies will be connected to the SDC over a 1G to 2Gbps SONET ring, Grapoli says.
The redundant Gigabit Ethernet backbone will implement MPLS to support applications such as telehealth and online education, Grapoli says. So far, implementing MPLS has been the biggest challenge of the SDC project, officials say.
“We learned a lot there in terms of the variations in the IOS command set that were not obvious at the beginning,” Grapoli says. “What we’re doing is looking at the MPLS management offering that Cisco has… [and] making sure what’s applied on a switch or router is what should be applied, and making sure we’re not knocking things down when the set up commands are applied.”
Next steps include transitioning agency IT functions over the next two years and rolling out collaborative communications and security enhancements such as VoIP and end-to-end encryption, officials say.
The SDC’s data center consolidation initiative is part of the state’s six-year plan to remodel IT services and adheres to the federal government’s 1993 consolidation standards.
