The city of Melrose, Mass., will soon offer its computer servers to host data for neighboring Essex as a first step towards potentially providing data back up to other communities.
According to the Massachusetts Municipal Association, Melrose Mayor Robert Dolan crafted the plan while Dolan worked on the governor’s Regionalization Advisory Commission. He has apparently had conversations with several other neighboring communities, who have shown interest in backing up their data on Melrose’s servers.
According to the city of Melrose, there are many reasons to utilize its IT infrastructure:
- Costs: Shared datacenter reduces the capital the burden on each city or town to build, maintain and sustain high quality data services
- Leverage:Collective funding of a data center extends the buying power, which in turn allows the regional group to purchase a higher quality, more robust datacenter
- Savings:Shared systems reduce the burden on each city or town to fund necessary disaster-recovery and business-continuity initiatives
- Regulations:Shared services reduce the burden on each city or town to fund necessary initiatives to comply with various regulatory costs (i.e. email archiving)
- Predictability:Collective purchasing and financing provides predictable costs over the term of the agreement
- Energy:Single regional data center reduces the cost of powering and cooling individual data centers, resulting in energy savings for each participating city or town
- Labor:Regionalization allows participating city/towns to share staffing costs
The town of Essex, for example, with a population of roughly 3,500, has agreed to pay $6,500 for each full year of service. The contract covers a two-year period, but can be extended annually for up to 25 years.
One reason that Essex was willing to be the first to sign up with Melrose is that Essex has a relatively new computer server of its own. By having its own IT infrastructure, Essex will have the ability to move out of the relationship and handle its own IT if Melrose can’t meet its needs.
Original coverage from the MMA is available here. The city’s statement and information on their IT regionalization plan is here, complete with white papers, research, a tech blog, and more.