City of Viernheim

New town hall to focus more on energy efficiency and data security for the entire administration in future – Initial situation

The city of Viernheim is already a long-standing customer of PFALZKOM. Until now, the city administration had been using a symmetrical internet connection and a traditional telephone connection at the previous town hall location. Thanks to several years of cooperation and a high level of customer satisfaction, several projects, such as the switch to modern VoIP technology, have already been successfully implemented. Building on this, there were also discussions about intensifying and expanding the partnership in the areas of the Data Center and the Network & Connection.

Time for something new

New opportunities arose for the Viernheim city administration in an industrial estate, as new office buildings have been built here in recent years, one of which was rented by the city. The “New Town Hall” opened there at the beginning of 2024 as an additional location with the majority of offices and the city leadership moving there. As part of this planning, and based on the positive experience with PFALZKOM, the current networking concept and the infrastructure of the company’s own server room were jointly analyzed and optimized. “The specialists from PFALZKOM showed us various options, gave us a tour of their first-class Data Centers in Mutterstadt and were able to connect both town halls to their fiber optic network. It was all very impressive”, explains Norbert Ringhof, IT system administrator at the city of Viernheim.

The perfect solution for customers

The central location for the city of Viernheim’s IT is now PFALZKOM’s Data Centers. These are two highly secure and highly available buildings with an optimal power supply directly on the European interconnected grid and network connection (DE-CIX enabled site). Here, the city uses a server rack in which it operates IT infrastructure such as servers, storage systems and firewalls – with the support of another IT service provider. The symmetrical broadband internet connection from PFALZKOM is also located in this rack. The data connections of the city’s various locations are ensured via fixed connections each with a bandwidth of 1 Gbit/s. Of course, all other locations will also be connected in this way in the future.

The advantages of this solution

By moving to PFALZKOM’s Data Centers, the city of Viernheim can avoid the resource-intensive rework or new construction as well as its own operation of the server room. The customer also benefits from the energy efficiency of the PFALZKOM infrastructure, which saves electricity and therefore CO2. This is achieved sustainably through the use of 100% green electricity from hydropower. Mr. Philipp Haas (Head of the City of Viernheim) adds: “IT security, cyber threats and increasing requirements are very difficult for organizations like ours to manage alone. Added to this is the worsening shortage of skilled workers. We are happy about the regional solution with PFALZKOM, especially with the PFALZWERKE Group is a practically municipal company behind it, with which we feel we are well looked after.”

For the future, there are other applications that can be implemented quickly, for example by expanding capacity with additional racks or using managed services for additional storage, backups, firewalls or virtual machines. Services from other customers in the Data Center are also just a cross-connect away and offer interesting and data protection-compliant cloud services such as telephone systems, communication and file sharing platforms or voice bots, especially for municipal institutions.