City of Hoover, Alabama, Simplifies Network Management and Increases Bandwidth with Pica8 PICOS® NOS

Palo Alto, CA, October 16, 2019 — Pica8, the leading provider of automated open networking software for enterprise campus and access networks, today announced that the City of Hoover, Alabama, has opted to replace their legacy data networking switching infrastructure with an open networking solution from Pica8 run by the company’s Linux-based network operating system, PICOS®. In deploying the Pica8 PICOS NOS, the city has simplified network management, increased bandwidth, reduced costs and achieved sub-millisecond response times to users throughout the city.

The city’s previous network, predominately from Cisco, included many unwanted and unnecessary features, making costs higher and network management more complex. After the Mayor and City Council of Hoover allocated funds to upgrade the city’s IT infrastructure, the City of Hoover investigated new solutions. Inspired by recent success stories with open networking, the city partnered with local IT solutions provider, Logista Solutions, to replace switches to support the city’s operations information systems, including telephone, public safety systems and emergency operation centers.

“The city needed to reduce maintenance costs and position itself to take advantage of cutting-edge technologies, such as software-defined networks and open network concepts,” said Greg Boykin, Information Systems Manager for the City of Hoover. “In addition, since tax dollars fund our operations, finding economical ways to future-proof our network is key, and deploying PICOS, along with Edgecore hardware, allows us to cost-effectively grow the network over time, investing tax dollars wisely without sacrificing performance.”

PICOS gives the City of Hoover the needed redundancy and performance needed to properly support two 911 and emergency operations centers. With a fault-tolerant meshed network for redundancy, the city has seamless failover in case of a yet-to-be-seen network failure. In terms of performance, the City of Hoover began with 10 gigabit ethernet, and has upgraded to 40 gigabits, which decreases response times from 2-4 milliseconds, to sub-millisecond.

“The City of Hoover has built a fully redundant, high performance network for its nine city facilities, including police and fire stations and emergency response dispatch, while also positioning itself for future technologies,” said Jeff Paine, SVP of marketing for Pica8. “By implementing a two-tier leaf-spine network architecture with PICOS, the city can lower latency and increase performance, which is crucial when it comes to 911 dispatch and other emergency operations.”

About Pica8
Pica8 was first to market with a modern, disaggregated open networking alternative to tightly coupled legacy Ethernet switches when it released its Linux-based network operating system (NOS), PICOS, running on a wide variety white box and brite box ODM switches. Today, with over 1,000 customers in 40+ countries, Pica8 – also the inventor of Open Intent-Based Networking — is the leading provider of highly automated, intelligent access-edge and campus open networking solutions for large global enterprise networks. These solutions can be ordered directly from Pica8 or through a variety of other global partners. For more information, visit www.pica8.com, email us at sales@pica8.com, or follow us on LinkedIn or on Twitter.