Architecture authority over a tiered six-site data center estate serving the city and five external agencies.
A primary facility downtown that also operated as a multi-tenant colocation provider. A backup command center and secondary site at a decommissioned naval air station, carrying computer-aided dispatch for both the Sheriff’s Office and Fire and Rescue. An out-of-state disaster recovery cabinet in an Atlanta carrier hotel, reached over the state research network and a ten-gigabit carrier circuit. A tertiary site at a state university regional facility, evaluated and costed. Separate court and clerk facilities. A deliberately constrained cloud footprint alongside all of it.
By the end the load-balancing tier was being planned across three sites together rather than site by site, which is the point at which an estate stops being a collection of rooms.
The facilities layer was instrumented as a program in its own right from 2019: automatic transfer switches across the power chain, environmental monitoring and a data center infrastructure management platform, replacing years of running uninterruptible power and rack distribution manually — on an estate already carrying in-row cooling from 2007, overhead busway, raised floor, and hot and cold aisle containment.
Selling against carriers
Multi-tenant colocation was designed, costed, value-engineered and priced, then sold to external government customers against commercial carrier alternatives: three build-outs running concurrently between 2015 and 2017, each under its own project number with a letter of intent, an implementation agreement, a rate sheet and a formal risk assessment.
The state courts administrator’s disaster recovery cage is documented end to end. A thirty-thousand-dollar build-out met a customer expectation of twelve to fifteen thousand, and the gap was closed by engineering rather than by discounting: copper removed from two cabinets entirely, the intermediate distribution frame copper cut back to what the adjacent cabinet actually required, and fiber counts revised down to twelve single-mode and twelve laser-optimized multimode strands, with the cabinet and overhead layouts redrawn to match.
The recurring charge settled at $13,696 a year, structured as explicitly variable with floor-space expense and with the number of agencies sharing the research network on-ramp — against roughly sixty thousand the customer was then paying a carrier for a three-hundred-megabit circuit.
A reciprocal arrangement with the aviation authority carried its own risk review, scoring each exposure before and after mitigation, including future compliance exposure: inherent high, mitigated to low.
A municipal technology department quoting and winning a technical service against a commercial competitor is an unusual capability. It is the commercial half of the work rather than an adjunct to it.
Outcome
External government customers buying data center service from a city IT department, priced and won against commercial alternatives.