CASE STUDY
OUR WATER DATA IS CRITICALLY IMPORTANT , AND IT NEEDS TO BE SHARED .
where the workload dictates , and businesscritical and operational applications are hosted at a government-run data center . Robinson said as part of the refresh , he explored moving all the business ’ workloads to the cloud but opted for a hybrid approach underpinned by Nutanix as it offered WaterNSW a number of key benefits .
“ Nutanix represented better value for money than going to a cloud-only strategy ,” he said . “ Not only would we save a further 50 %, Nutanix ’ s consolidated approach means we can emulate the cloud capabilities in-house without a huge amount of effort .”
Since the implementation , 400 applications have been transitioned to the new environment with a large number of those modernized to the latest Windows and SQL server versions meaning many of the underlying applications also had to be upgraded . Further , upgrades to business-critical applications have removed legacy system security vulnerabilities and enabled automated failover to an alternated data center , giving the critical infrastructure provider a much stronger Disaster Recovery capability .
Lee Thompson , Managing Director at Nutanix A / NZ , said hybrid cloud was emerging across enterprise and government as the preferred operating model and WaterNSW was a leading example of an Australian organization having the best of both worlds .
“ While some applications and data are suited to public cloud , the risk of handing others over to a third party is just too immense – particularly in the case of critical infrastructure such as water , utilities and government services .
“ WaterNSW understands the incredible value of its data . Through an innovative approach to its architecture , it has retained ownership and control over its most important asset , while simultaneously having the flexibility to share it in real time with those who matter most – its customers .”
Intelligent CIO asked Ian Robinson , CIO at WaterNSW , further questions about the deployment .
Can you explain how Nutanix software allows WaterNSW to process data by first capturing and then storing it ?
The Nutanix solution runs various systems including our telemetry and SCADA master stations that connect directly to communications networks that in turn connect to individual sites and measurement gauges or remote terminating units that take SCADA commands and operate actuators to open or close a valve or other physical field device action . We collect data through remote control systems where we receive data every 15 minutes or so from many sites . We also capture data from field measurements made by field staff that
capture the data into a computer on site and which then synchronises with a back-end data base .
Nutanix provides the underlying infrastructure and management software services that allows us to run many workloads on these environments to enable the above functions .
Can you explain how the data is interfaced between a range of customer-centric applications ?
Our customer centric applications are generally web portals that provide dashboard information and detailed drill downs or large data set transfers . Typically , we upload the data from our capture systems and transaction applications to a data lake that then processes these using micro services to provide web applets that come together to form a page of a website . For example , clicking on the map as shown in the picture below accesses a single micros service to show the size and inflow volume in a specific dam .
How important is data to your decision-making process ?
Data is fundamental to all parts of the business but it is a big transformation to enable every piece of data we use to be easily accessed , shared with our key stakeholders , quality checked and then presented in a way that can be used . Up to now we have been Big Data users but
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