DWSD's New Data Center

The Detroit Water & Sewerage Department is featured in a Data Center Journal article, “Case Study: Data Center Infrastructure in Detroit,” by Anil Gosine, December 8, 2015.

Excerpts:

The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD), completed a $6 million data center modernization project that consists of highly automated standardized infrastructure...Power and cooling, the physical backbone of the data center, was designed and constructed to be flexible enough to keep up with automated, virtualized, dynamic technologies while balancing capacity constraints, efficiency demands and budgets…

IT operations are a crucial aspect of most organizational operations around the world and at DWSD. One of the main concerns is business continuity...It was necessary to provide a reliable infrastructure for IT operations to minimize any chance of disruption. As information security was a major concern this data center upgrade had to offer a secure environment, minimizing the chances of a breach…

Wastewater Treatment Plant (Photo by Voice of Detroit)

The purpose of the project was to upgrade DWSD’s data centers to industry standards for improved reliability and uptime, operational sustainability, and supportability...As a result of the increased demand for computers, data and telephones, the department had to develop a reliable, secure and available communications infrastructure to its mission...The overall object was to create a cleaner, safer and more organized data center environment so that DWSD could maintain and service the equipment, facility and users in a more cost-effective manner. The result allows DWSD personnel to function more efficiently during future relocations, additions and changes, reducing downtime…
 

This upgrade now gives DWSD the capability to optimize the equipment housed in these data centers, strengthen the network infrastructure and work with partners to integrate their data...DWSD’s future challenges are to ensure that every asset is utilized optimally; to eliminate fragmented operations, tools and information; and to collate and analyze the metrics needed to bridge the data center divide.

…[T]he data center management team must know the vendors and internal and external customers; maintenance practices and procedures must be rigid, centralized and authenticated.

Another important task is to ensure that the IT division avoids becoming understaffed and overworked…[V]irtual perfection is expected…[A]dministrators must avoid technical shortcuts, which can take their toll on support procedures and compromise overall security.

DWSD can now plan, deploy and maintain a sound virtual infrastructure. The interest of the department is now less in bottom-line costs and more on extracting business value.

(Mr. Gosine “...has been involved in the water/wastewater industry for over 10 years...He is currently the industrial control system (ICS) administrator at Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, where he manages and administers the department-wide controls systems, ICS network infrastructure and cybersecurity.”)