Smarter IT for Smart Cities

In China, Smart Cities are a hot topic, and the China Smart City Research Institute, established jointly by the Liaocheng City People’s Government, the National Mapping and Geographic Information Bureau, and Liaocheng University, is working on a number of eco-friendly projects.

The goal is to devise Smart City solutions with commercial potential to export to the rest of the world as well as support China’s own development. With urbanization such a concern, the university wanted to maximize the creative potential of the 120 institute staff and focus its attention on enhancing the desktop experience.

“We looked for collaborative and responsive support, and we got that from Dell,” says Yu Bo, information center director at the China Smart City Research Institute. A number of meetings took place so the Dell team could fully understand the needs of the institute before it came back with a high performance virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution.

In coming to its decision, the university compared the HP C3000 blade system with the Dell PowerEdge FX modular architecture, featuring Intel® Xeon® processors, which puts servers, storage, networking and management into a single 2U chassis. The beauty of the Dell solution for the university was that it could rapidly deploy an energy-efficient, highly scalable VDI.

“Because our design was based on the Dell FX2 modular infrastructure instead of rack servers, we increased the density of our IT by 300 percent,” Yu says. “We estimate the savings to be RMB 1.6 million (US $245,000).”

The solution also resulted in a 50 percent reduction in IT management time, 30 percent faster mathematical modeling, and an expected ROI of 300 percent in five years.

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