Case Study: City of Houston achieves 25% reduction in IT power use and greener operations with CyrusOne data center consolidation

CyrusOne Helps City of Houston to Go Green and Reduce Energy Consumption through Data Center Consolidation

CyrusOne partnered with the City of Houston to support the city’s “go green” initiative after Houston IT Services identified nine separate, office-based IT footprints that consumed excessive energy, duplicated services, required heavy maintenance, and were vulnerable to hurricanes and flooding. The city needed to consolidate infrastructure to reclaim office space, reduce energy use and carbon emissions, improve security and disaster resilience, and lower total cost of ownership.

The city consolidated six of its nine footprints into two Class 3+ offsite colocation footprints, with the primary footprint hosted at CyrusOne’s Houston West facility (100% uptime SLA, 2N power/cooling redundancy, low PUE, outside the flood plain) and a secondary downtown backup. The move delivered a 25% reduction in power-and-cooling use for IT environmentals, avoided roughly $2.4M in capital expenditures per decommissioned data room, reclaimed office space for city departments, improved disaster resilience and connectivity, and enabled more predictable, lower operating costs with a target 10% reduction in carbon emissions.

City of Houston

Charles Thompson

Head of IT Services