The City of Baltimore has spent about $1 million so far to create a fabric-based computing infrastructure, reports Government Technology.
According to city CIO Chris Tonjes, the infrastructure upgrade is roughly 80 percent complete, and another $500,000 should have the fabric-based infrastructure upgrade complete by the end of 2013. In a fabric-based infrastructure, the hardware and software components of large-scale IT infrastructure are combined (woven together, hence “fabric-based”). Gartner has a good definition, but the benefit for the city is two-fold, as Government Technology reports:
- The city now “has about 10 times the storage it had previously.”
- The upgrade has the city “poised to offer better services, including an internal and external cloud.”
Baltimore contracted with Cisco, Dell and VMware on the project.