CASE STUDY
Mike Farrington, Technical Operations
Manager, Manchester City Council, said:
“Working to a clear set of requirements
aligned to our strategic objectives, we
completed a detailed, vendor-agnostic
appraisal, with Nutanix Enterprise Cloud
identified as the most appropriate solution.
“We recognised that the solution went
far beyond meeting our immediate
infrastructure and disaster recovery
requirements, providing us with a
comprehensive set of technologies, tools and
services to support other, more ambitious
projects and initiatives.”
Customer outcome
Enterprise Cloud installation took just a few
days, followed by the migration of 900+
application workloads over a period of three
to four months, with immediate benefits.
For example, along with greater levels of
performance and cloud-like scalability, rack
occupancy was reduced by 90%.
This has contributed to an annual saving of
£285,000 per annum through a significant
reduction in power and cooling, as well as
rack space. The move to Nutanix Enterprise
Cloud also supports the city’s ambitious
climate change target to become a
zero-carbon city by 2038. The migration
to Nutanix Enterprise Cloud has both
consolidated and simplified the council’s
data centre infrastructure which, in turn, will
enable Farrington and his team to de-risk
the planned move to separate colocation
facilities later this year.
Another positive outcome is that the council
no longer needs separate groups to manage
compute and storage resources. Instead,
these have been combined to create a
single multi-skilled team able to manage
and support all aspects of the infrastructure,
as well as provide a valuable resource to
support future projects.
We spoke to Mike Farrington, Technical
Operations Manager, Manchester City Council,
to find out more about the implementation.
How far have the solutions future-
proofed the organisation?
The implementation of Nutanix has
delivered immediate benefits for the council
www.intelligentcio.com
(infrastructure consolidation, reduced
support and maintenance cost, resilience
and performance and reduced management
overhead), but it really was the pace of
innovation and how that can support the
council's strategic objectives and desire to be
at the cutting edge which set Nutanix apart
from other technical solutions.
In the short term, Nutanix is a key enabler
for the delivery of our Data Centre and
Infrastructure Strategy, with a focus on
ensuring we have in place the appropriate
level of resilience and disaster recovery
capability. Looking beyond that, Nutanix will
support our adoption of cloud services with
the freedom and flexibility to select the most
appropriate solutions based on requirements
– Azure, AWS, GCP or Xi.
The council plans to migrate from
VMware to Nutanix AHV in 2020,
enabling a significant reduction in license
cost at a time of financial constraint. There
is also keen interest in the future
development of Nutanix Volumes and
Files, with the potential to further
consolidate infrastructure.
Thinking about the longer term, it will be
interesting to see where Nutanix takes
products such as Flow, with a need for
all organisations to adopt more of an
application-centric security posture, Xi Leap
and the consideration for reduction of on
premise infrastructure and cloud disaster
recovery capability, and Xi IoT with a huge
focus right now on IoT, AI and ML.
In short, the investment in Nutanix is not
seen as a short-term tactical solution. It
enables the delivery of our short to mid-term
infrastructure strategy, with some immediate
benefits in that regard, but the real value
for the council will likely be in the future
and the relationship with an innovative and
disruptive technology vendor.
How has this benefited the
end-user/public?
With regards to how Nutanix has benefited
the end-user and the public, I always say
to my technical teams that a successful
infrastructure project is one that nobody is
aware of and that was certainly true with our
implementation of Nutanix.
The majority of the council's applications
and services are underpinned by
approximately 1,000 virtual servers, all
of which were migrated to Nutanix with
minimal impact to critical council services.
The council delivers critical services to
Manchester residents, some of whom are
the most vulnerable in society, so the need
for resilience, performance and availability at
the infrastructure level is paramount.
The migration to Nutanix provides us
with greater assurance given the built-in
resilience, and the ability to protect and
recover critical application and services using
Protection Domains and Snapshots.
There have been no infrastructure-related
service-impacting major incidents
since the migration – these were all too
common previously.
While there are always limits to what
you can deliver from a performance
improvement perspective (certainly for
legacy applications), there have been
performance improvements for a number
of widely used transactional applications,
likely attributed to the way in which
Nutanix is architected with local read and
write (data locality). n
THE MOVE TO NUTANIX
ENTERPRISE CLOUD ALSO SUPPORTS
THE CITY’S AMBITIOUS CLIMATE
CHANGE TARGET TO BECOME A
ZERO-CARBON CITY BY 2038.
INTELLIGENTCIO
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