Case Study: City of Houston achieves $1M annual savings and 24/7 service reliability with NetApp

Providing World-Class Services to One of America’s Biggest Cities

The City of Houston—serving 2.2 million residents with 22,000 employees across 22 departments—faced systems sprawl and a pressing need for around-the-clock availability to support critical services like courts, first responders, and city programs. To improve reliability, responsiveness, and fiscal efficiency, the city set out to standardize, centralize, and modernize its IT infrastructure.

Houston consolidated seven data centers into a private cloud built on FlexPod with NetApp ONTAP, Cisco UCS servers, and Cisco Nexus switches, using NetApp SnapMirror and Flash Pool for disaster recovery and performance. The solution eliminated outages during severe 2015 flooding, streamlined court and payroll systems (including CSMART and SAP), enabled the ETHAN telehealth program, reclaimed facility space, and reduced costs by about $1 million annually while boosting service responsiveness and collections.

City of Houston

Dan Steege

Assistant Director for the Enterprise Infrastructure Services Division