CASE STUDY
A
s a modern, forward-thinking
city authority, Manchester City
Council has ambitious plans to
take advantage of technological advances
to meet the challenges of its increasingly
diverse and mobile population.
At the same time, however, it has to meet
the immediate needs of city residents
and do so against a background of strict
financial constraints, onerous governance
requirements and rapidly escalating demand
in sectors as diverse as transport, recycling,
housing and adult social care.
Balancing these demands meant replacing
legacy IT infrastructure and doing so with
regard to the UK government’s Cloud First
policy, whereby public sector organisations
are required to fully evaluate potential cloud
solutions before any other option.
As such, the council established a five-year
strategy to build a more agile, flexible and
highly available infrastructure based on
a mix of cloud computing and software-
defined data centre technologies.
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INTELLIGENTCIO
Rather than public cloud only however,
the council opted to put an on-premise
hyperconverged infrastructure at the heart
of its strategy and, following an open tender
procedure, chose the Nutanix Enterprise
Cloud as the best way of achieving that goal.
With the first phase of implementation now
almost complete, the council is reaping the
rewards of this ambitious project in terms
of lower total cost of ownership, improved
performance and vastly enhanced availability.
Moreover, it is moving ahead with plans to
exploit other advantages conferred by its
investment in the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud.
Challenge
One of the biggest local government
contracts to be awarded in the UK, the
Manchester City Council infrastructure
project was initiated in the wake of
escalating maintenance, management and
support issues with its legacy IT platforms.
A fundamental requirement was a move
away from a conventional on-premise data
centre to a hyperconverged infrastructure
distributed across two new colocation
facilities with the aim of building a scalable,
robust and highly resilient infrastructure to
meet both the immediate and ambitious
long-term IT needs of the council and the
population it serves.
Solution
To future-proof its investment and deliver
maximum agility, the council decided to
build its replacement infrastructure around
cloud and software defined technologies.
It opted for Cisco ACI (Application Centric
Infrastructure) for software-defined
networking and also evaluated a number
of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI)
solutions to virtualise, manage and secure
compute and storage resources.
With its emphasis on delivering the benefits
of a public cloud approach in a secure
enterprise environment, the council decided
that the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud was the
best fit for its requirements.
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