Before 2011, the City of New York’s Department of Information Technology and Communications (DoITT) operated more than 50 unique data centers, many lacking fundamental capabilities. The New York Citywide IT Infrastructure Services Program, known as CITIServ, is a program to modernise and optimise the city’s IT infrastructure environment by consolidating disparate data centers, reducing the New York City’s infrastructure footprint and providing a unified set of shared services to a broad range of city entities. CITIServ increases inter-agency data sharing and allows for more effective collaboration to better serve the city’s many businesses, visitors and residents.

 At the same time, the city opened a new 18,000-square-foot data center in Downtown Brooklyn to fortify the city’s shared services environment. In order to realize the full benefits and cost savings of a shared services environment, equipment cabinets and infrastructure needed to be located in large open spaces to optimize the performance of air handling systems and environmental conditions. In addition, to optimize space and cost savings in the new data center, the design also needed to avoid the use of separated rooms or ‘caged suites’, which can typically waste 15 to 20% of floor space through inefficient cabinet row layout. This however, creates a real security issue.

In the post-September-11 era, with security considerations of the utmost important, the city’s DoITT chose TZ’s IXP micro-security solutions as a critical measure in safeguarding confidentiality and shared access within its new data center facility. The TZ Praetorian System interfaced with a third-party building access control system to extend the electronic access control system beyond the perimeter door right down to the individual cabinets which were secured with TZ SlideHandles.

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