How Phoenix powers 1.6M residents with Everpure

The city of Phoenix, the capital of Arizona and the nation’s fifth-largest city, serves as a vital centre of government, commerce, and culture for the Southwest. Its municipal government delivers a wide range of essential services to residents and businesses, many available through convenient online self-service portals. They manage everything from water and wastewater management to public safety, transit, and aviation via Sky Harbor International Airport, one of the busiest airports in the country.

The City of Phoenix serves more than 1.6 million residents across essential services from water and public safety to aviation and public transportation. Citizens depend on Phoenix's technology infrastructure for everything from paying water bills to keeping the always-on transit fare systems for buses and Sky Harbor International Airport, one of the largest airports in the country, up and running.  

Jerry Simpson, Deputy CIO for Enterprise Infrastructure Services for the City of Phoenix, leads a 40-person team responsible for keeping critical systems running 24/7 for 18,000 city employees. His career spans 25 years with Phoenix and 10 years prior with the state of Arizona, giving him a deep perspective on government technology challenges.

"From an IT standpoint, we are the ones that keep the lights on," says Simpson. "So nobody's really screaming when things are working. When they're screaming is when something goes down."

The challenge facing Phoenix was significant: supporting existing systems that have been around for up to 20 years while simultaneously adding modern systems connected to Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Kubernetes Engine environments. This created what Simpson calls "application sprawl," where the city purchases the best solutions but ends up using only 15% of their capabilities, leading to multiple disparate systems that are difficult to integrate and manage.

Phoenix implemented the Everpure platform as the backbone for a resilient metro cluster environment spread across two data centers. The solution now spans over 13 arrays citywide, supporting not just central IT but expanding into specialized departments including transit, water, courts, and the Phoenix Police Department.

"Pure stood out for its dependability, low-touch operations, and unparalleled customer support," says Simpson. The city manages over 3PB of municipal data across block, file, and object storage for both legacy and cloud-native applications.

The reliability proved crucial when a city department experienced catastrophic equipment failure with another vendor's storage environment. "The Pure team came to the forefront because they knew we were a Pure partner at the enterprise level," Simpson recalls. "They got us up and running in a week. It wasn't about what we're going to charge you. How can we help you get back online?" The experience demonstrates what Simpson values most about the Everpure approach: "Pure is top. They're customer-oriented."

Phoenix took its infrastructure resilience to the next level by implementing disaster recovery as a service with Evergreen//One™. "We're replicating Pure to Pure between our on-prem environment and our disaster recovery site," explains Simpson.  The solution integrates VMware Site Recovery Manager for orchestrated recovery, ensuring the city can meet strict recovery point and recovery time objectives. The city conducts regular disaster recovery testing to validate that critical systems can be recovered quickly in the event of a true disaster.

The implementation also includes SafeMode™ Snapshots and Object Lock features for immutable data protection, crucial for a government entity managing sensitive citizen data and maintaining compliance requirements.

The city leveraged Evergreen subscriptions for predictable, nondisruptive and self-service upgrades without costly procurement cycles that typically plague government IT departments. "Rather than just dealing with the current year and the year-by-year, you're dealing over three- to five-year periods," explains Simpson. "You get new controllers, new enhancements, deduplication, compression levels, you get all that with the subscription and the Evergreen model."

This eliminates the need for lengthy RFP processes and procurement analysis every few years, allowing Phoenix to focus resources on serving citizens rather than administrative overhead.

The Enterprise Data Cloud vision, built on the Everpure platform architecture, particularly resonated with Phoenix's challenge of managing disparate systems. "Something like the Enterprise Data Cloud is going to allow groups to start having some conversion of that sprawl, pull it in a little bit," says Simpson. "Anywhere that we can save money is saving money for taxpayers."

Phoenix continues expanding Everpure across additional departments while optimizing disaster recovery capabilities and exploring advanced features. "We have groups of developers within the city that are developing dashboards and other things, not only for the city mayor's office or the manager's office, but for the residents to see," says Simpson. "All that stuff's captured and reported back on dashboards. It's all living in our data. It's all living in our storage."

For Simpson, who has dedicated his entire career to public service, the technology choices are meaningful for the city he lives in. "I've always worked in government. One of the things about working in government is you have to have that understanding. You're working for the people, you're giving back to the community," he says.

"Everpure is a very long-term solution; you start to see the benefits four, five, 10 years down the road," says Simpson. "We're not just buying for today, we're building trust and infrastructure for tomorrow."