It's hard enough being a department of two. Now imagine managing an out-of-date network infrastructure in an old, three-story building. And add two other older buildings running the same decrepit network and you have the scenario that was facing the two-man IT department of the City of Biel, Switzerland.

The city's network engineers turned to Cisco to help solve the difficult task of trying to fix their current situation while attempting to address the network's future needs.

Cisco suggested utilizing a central point of management that can rapidly configure and deploy switches with a central switch. The following products were used:

• Cisco Catalyst 6800 Series Switches
• Cisco Catalyst Virtual Switching System
• Cisco Catalyst Instant Access
• Cisco Nexus 5000 Series Switches
• Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extenders
• Cisco 5508 Wireless Controllers

With over 2400 employees spread across 60 locations-including 20 schools-the central point of management solution was able to create a scalable, easy-to-manage network backbone. With fewer devices to worry about and enhanced network resiliency, network management has been simplified and productivity has improved.

In fact, network management has been so simplified that the city no longer needs to outsource technical services-saving 0.5 full-time employees.

"We use Cisco technologies for nearly everything, from our VoIP phones and wireless controllers to Cisco ASR and Cisco UCS in our data center," says Thomas Bondenmann, CTO, City of Biel. "We will continue to leverage our existing Cisco foundation in our future initiatives."

Bondenmann further said now that he and his colleague aren't troubleshooting network issues, they have more time to proactively plan for the network's future.

To learn more about the City of Biel solution, please visit the case study page.