City of Avondale Deploys VMware’s Unified Platform for the Hybrid Cloud to Improve Security and Assure Business Continuity

PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwired - June 10, 2015) - VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today announced the City of Avondale, Ariz., has implemented VMware's unified platform for the hybrid cloud. By virtualizing the network with VMware NSX™ and adopting VMware vCloud® Air™ Disaster Recovery, the City is better equipped to protect critical services. More than simple backups, Avondale is better prepared to achieve quick recovery from unforeseen incidents that could impact the delivery of municipal services to citizens and businesses such as traffic management, water and wastewater utilities, and emergency response by police officers and firefighters.

The city of Avondale, an innovative community in the Phoenix Metropolitan area, is committed to making sure that critical health, safety, utility, and financial services are always available for its residents. According to the City of Avondale, its municipal government maintains a budget of $180 million with over 500 employees. The 16-person Information Technology (IT) department supports the community by using technology to engage the community and innovate municipal services to keep the city responsive, efficient, and secure.

The City was looking to improve its ability to recover from unforeseen disasters through cloud-based disaster recovery. Given the diverse sets of users accessing its private cloud infrastructure and cybersecurity goals they had defined, Avondale also sought to improve controls within their hybrid cloud environment. The City teamed with IT Partners (a VMware Solution Provider Partner) to implement production deployments of vCloud Air Disaster Recovery, followed by implementation of the VMware NSX network virtualization platform.

"VMware is continuously providing new innovations such as VMware NSX™ and VMware vCloud® Air™ Disaster Recovery that answer critical needs IT leaders must address in their strategic investments," said Rob Lloyd, CIO for the City of Avondale. "With VMware NSX, we're transforming the way we are able to architect the network and apply security to help protect the city's IT infrastructure and the citizens we support. With vCloud Air Disaster Recovery, we finally have a comfortable level of assurance in our ability to continuously operate at a cost point multiples lower than traditional recovery sites."

Re-architecting Security with VMware NSX and Micro-Segmentation
The City of Avondale runs a multi-tenant private cloud that hosts applications and data for a diverse set of users on FlexPod infrastructure. This includes employees responsible for city operations; police, fire and other emergency personnel; and citizens who can access a variety of applications from local libraries through the City's implementation of VMware Horizon.

The City has deployed VMware NSX on FlexPod in their production environment. Using micro-segmentation, the City can isolate and segment each set of users within the cloud so people or threats cannot move laterally (east-west between VMs) and access applications or information to which they are not authorized. VMware NSX offers City of Avondale technology staff several advantages over traditional network security approaches, including automated move/add/change for workloads, distributed policy enforcement at every virtual interface, and in-kernel, scale-out firewalling distributed to every hypervisor.

"We wanted to improve security inside of our data center; the last thing we want is public users accessing our servers and being able to snoop around to areas of the IT environment where they shouldn't be," said Mark Neerings, Assistant CIO for the City of Avondale. "Unfortunately using the traditional hardware firewall approach at the edge proved to be cost prohibitive. VMware NSX gives us security baked into the infrastructure layers, with security controls that go all the way down to the individual VM level. That's where we believe NSX provides exceptional value."

Assuring Continuity of Operations with vCloud Air Disaster Recovery
City of Avondale decided the cloud would be the best option for disaster recovery, and after considering several cloud service providers, Avondale chose VMware vCloud Air Disaster Recovery. Avondale uses vCloud Air to host a cloud-based failover environment in which it runs 15 critical business applications, including financials, human resources and engineering applications; business and collaboration solutions; utilities systems; databases; and web servers. Learn more about the City's implementation of vCloud Air Disaster Recovery in this video.

"We wanted to do a better job by achieving fast recovery and business resumption," said Aaron Favata, IT Systems Engineer at the city. "When we started looking at solutions, some providers were more rudimentary than we expected while others were too expensive. VMware vCloud Air Disaster Recovery services are priced realistically. With VMware, we finally have an assurance that we can stand back up after a disaster at a reasonable price. And we can take advantage of VMware technology to grow and to bring new solutions in and out of the cloud, easily."

Additional Resource

• Learn how to #VirtualizeYourNetwork
• For more information, visit the VMware NSX network virtualization platform web site
• Visit the vCloud Air Marketplace
• Subscribe to VMware's Network Virtualization, vCloud and Company blogs
• Keep up with VMware NSX on Facebook, Google+, Twitter and YouTube

About VMware
VMware is a leader in cloud infrastructure and business mobility. Built on VMware's industry-leading virtualization technology, our solutions deliver a brave new model of IT that is fluid, instant and more secure. Customers can innovate faster by rapidly developing, automatically delivering and more safely consuming any application. With 2014 revenues of $6 billion, VMware has more than 500,000 customers and 75,000 partners. The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the world and can be found online at www.vmware.com.

VMware, vCloud Air and VMware NSX are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions. The use of the word "partner" or "partnership" does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.