Minneapolis, one of the US`s largest mid-West cities, has embarked on a "virtual city" initiative - and the implementation of a Unisyse-@ction Enterprise Server ES7000 is playing a key role. In terms of the initiative, Unisys and Minneapolis have projected the following scenarios:
* A mother needs day-care locations this morning.
* A neighbourhood watch group needs to coordinate with the city police department tonight.
* A city resident wants to look up his utility bill details and then make his payment over the Internet.
All of these - and access to information on hundreds of other city programmes online - will soon be available to Minneapolis citizens - thanks to the reliability, scalability and capacity of the Unisys ES7000. A 32-processor ES7000 server, running Windows 2000 Datacenter Server, will be used to power several of the city`s ambitious Web-based initiatives, including its virtual city transformation project.
In addition to the server backing Minneapolis`s e-government projects, a second Unisys ES7000 server will be used to consolidate City Hall`s essential Microsoft Windows-based applications such as e-mail, data communications and desktop management on a single platform. The government will experience considerable cost savings from running a low-maintenance IT function, resulting from a more streamlined computing environment.
Minneapolis`s inspiration to grow into an e-government came out of the city`s need to provide residents with a more flexible and accessible way to obtain information about vital records, public transportation, building permits, community services and hundreds of other government-sponsored services. With the power of the ES7000, Minneapolis community members will be able to access a host of information - ranging from voter registration applications to a listing of neighbourhood organisations - from the comfort of their homes and offices.
During the early phases of planning, project developers realised the city`s IT infrastructure lacked the power to move to the Internet with its existing network of servers. To achieve 24/7 uptime, availability and reliability, Minneapolis turned to the large-scale, mainframe-class capacity of the Unisys ES7000.
Moving to a single, Windows-based platform enables Minneapolis to consolidate the workload of six commodity servers. The result should be better service while maximising its resources. In addition, the city`s IT staff now will be able to access and manage between 10 and 20 applications on a single server, rather than in a distributed server environment.
"It was important for us to identify a hardware solution that could scale up to meet our online transaction processing demands and solve some of our real-life network infrastructure challenges," says Karl Kaiser, CIO, City of Minneapolis. "When looking at hardware alternatives, we searched for a versatile platform that could consolidate multiple applications, handle heavy workloads and provide 24/7 availability. We found the overall power and functionality of the ES7000 best suited for the task of seamlessly supporting our intensive back-office and online needs."
The Unisys ES7000 is based on the Unisys Cellular MultiProcessing (CMP) server architecture, which provides an array of computing capabilities required for enterprise-class e-business computing - capabilities well known to users of large-scale computers, but unprecedented in computing environments using Microsoft and Intel technology. The ES7000 was designed for the power of Intel 64-bit Itanium processors. Using CMP`s innovative partitioning capabilities, Itanium and Pentium III Xeon processors can run side-by-side in one server. These and other advantages enable CMP-based servers to match the performance of Unix systems in enterprise-class e-business and other critical applications at a fraction of the price.
"To create a lean and efficient IT network, a large organisation can easily be streamlined by consolidating key application workloads on a single server," says Andre Purchase, strategic marketing programmes manager, systems and technology, at Unisys Africa. "With the extent of the ES7000`s technical capabilities, a city government can maintain an intelligent, cost-effective computing backbone to carry out the administration`s high-level technology priorities with confidence and ease from one single point of management."
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