Melrose wanted to maintain an active, innovative network that was efficient and made sense from a financial standpoint. The city chose the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) with FlexPod as the underlying technology to provide IT services to 18 sites within the city, including a variety of agencies such as the public school system and the police and fire departments.

The Melrose school district, for example, has about 1,300 computers spread across seven buildings, which requires a lot of networking infrastructure and the capability to meet many, diverse demands. The school system in Melrose is a particular source of pride for the city. In fact, Melrose High School was recently ranked among the 1,000 best public high schools in the nation by Newsweek. Thus, it was important for the city to meet expectations and future demand with technology that would help continue the tradition of educational excellence.

Prior to the implementation of FlexPod, each school had its own data center or, in the case of elementary schools, small-scale server rooms. By implementing FlexPod, the city consolidated the schools' entire infrastructure into a single data center. A secondary data center is available for off-site storage and for recovery and business continuity.

Among many other benefits, the city has seen the time required to deploy applications across the school district go from several weeks to just a few hours. This greatly enhances the services Melrose can offer its students, faculty and staff while simultaneously reducing costs.

In addition, the city is now using this data center technology to build a secure, multitenant cloud that can host multiple communities, allowing the city to offer hosted services without latency issues.

We are proud to play a role in the transformation of Melrose's network and help the city deliver the next generation of services to its citizens.

For more information on the Melrose UCS deployment, read our case study.