Case Study: City Harvest scales to deliver millions more pounds of food with Cisco HyperFlex

Nonprofit ramps up to deliver millions more pounds of food with Cisco HyperFlex System and Cisco UCS

City Harvest is a New York City nonprofit that rescues and distributes surplus food (160 employees, 15,000 volunteers) and was preparing for roughly 30% growth in operations. To avoid costly desktop refreshes and support mobile staff and volunteers, City Harvest chose the Cisco HyperFlex System (with Cisco UCS for business applications) after an initial virtual desktop attempt on existing servers hit performance limits.

Cisco HyperFlex hosts City Harvest’s virtual desktops while Cisco UCS runs core applications, and the combined solution was deployed in a day. The IT team built hundreds of virtual desktops in minutes, enabling staff and volunteers to log in from anywhere; thin clients cost 75% less than new desktops; moving 100 VMs to Cisco UCS eliminated a rack and averted more than $100,000 in cooling expenses. Cisco HyperFlex’s scalability lets City Harvest add nodes or compute-only servers as demands grow, improving efficiency and supporting expanded food rescue.

City Harvest

James Safonov

Head of IT and Information Security