Heraklion
Smart City

In the category Data Centers Infrastructure for data collection & storage from IoT application sensors, the Municipality of Heraklion won the gold award in the Uniform Computing Infrastructure with “blade” arrays and the use of online storage systems (SAN).

In a modern city, development and management of computer infrastructure and digital services is an essential part of its design. Over time, more and more digital applications-conveniences are being implemented, with the primary concern of improving its productivity towards the citizen and its visitors. Given a variety of electronic solutions, the proper use of computer infrastructures for their hosting is a difficult task.

Over time, more and more digital applications are implemented – facilities, with the primary concern being the improvement of its productivity towards the citizen and its visitors. Given the variety of electronic solutions, the proper utilization of the computing infrastructure for their hosting is a difficult task.

The energy is about the use of modern technologies in order to use them more efficiently to minimize management and monitoring time, the easier expansion of systems and the provision of highly available electronic services.

• possibility of development and expansion according to the needs in computing power
• creation and management of public and private computing “clouds”
• providing computer services to end users in a remote environment

In previous years, the computing infrastructure relied primarily on multiple separate server systems. Each server usually hosted a specific service or group of related object services. This model had some key issues:

a. The supply of material throughout the year created heterogeneous and incompatible systems.

b. The timing of potential hardware or upgrade issues was important.

c. The introduction of new services or the hosting of test environments for software development may have required the supply of new hardware as well as significant implementation time.

d. Monitoring the materials of all servers for possible problems was difficult.

Creating a uniform computing infrastructure with “blade” arrays and the use of online storage systems (SANs) offered multiple advantages over the previous approach.

a. Expansibility by purchasing new storage media or servers.

b. Central remote management.

c. Ability to create secure or isolated environments for hosting services that are the result of collaborations with third cities or organizations.

d. Immediate provision of additional resources to cover the individual electronic services needs in load conditions.

e. Homogeneous central management of backups and snapshots.

f. Immediate provision of test environments for the development of existing and new services.

g. Ability to provide additional services to citizens, for which there were no necessary resources with the previous model.

The implementation took place in 4 stages.

a. Analysis of requirements of existing applications in computing infrastructure as well as provision for innovative services.

b. Supply of blade array systems, online storage media and backup system.

c. Setup Initialization of servers and installation – configuration the Openstack cloud computing platform.

d. Progressive services transfer and release outgoing discrete servers.

The use of these technologies has bought multiple benefits during its use.

a. Reduced energy consumption. The energy consumption of the systems has been reduced by 30% compared to the previous infrastructure.

b. Better utilization of the individual computing resources of the servers.

The utilization rate of blade(utilization) servers is close to 80%, compared to the previous model which used an average of 20% of the resources.

c. Minimization or even zeroing of service interruptions in cases of failure of materials or maintenance functions.

d. Significant reduction of administrative tasks, such as the creation of new virtual machines regardless of operating system.

Creating a new virtual machine takes a considerable amount of time, compared to the previous infrastructure.

e. Exploitation of high availability technologies.

The availability of electronic services reaches 99.9% per year.

f. Increase of guest services.

g. Providing a data storage service