INDUSTRY WATCH
WE SELECTED NUTANIX BECAUSE IT GAVE US A CHOICE OF HARDWARE AND ENABLED US TO CONTINUE TO USE OUR VMWARE INVESTMENT AS WELL .
Customer outcome
The new platform has enabled Unley Council to dramatically consolidate its operations , minimizing the costs associated with managing multiple on-premises network devices .
“ We were very dependent on consultants before , for things like provisioning storage and servers ,” said Roberts . “ We spend a lot less on them now , for a tangible saving of approximately 50 %. That ’ s money we can re-invest into more important projects .”
James Roberts , Manager of Business Systems and Solutions at City of Unley
Roberts said : “ We have placed all our essential local government workloads and applications on to the new solution , including our multi-channel contact center that we use for online and voice interaction , as well as our bandwidth-intensive 3D modeling applications . We use a lot of mapping and analytics to measure our tree canopy cover , as part of our Smart City initiatives .”
To support Disaster Recovery ( DR ), the council configured its phone system in Nutanix Metro Availability , which enables smooth , immediate cutover to its external cluster if a system goes down .
The smaller footprint of the new solution has also driven considerable savings for the City of Unley .
“ Our previous three-tier system consisted of about 10 racks of compute equipment , and we have been able to reduce that to a quarter rack . Our power expenses have come down about 70 %, which is working out to tens of thousands of dollars – and 24,000 kg of CO2 emissions-saved per year ,” said Simon Sowerby , Technical Services Coordinator , City of Unley .
Perhaps best of all , the new solution helps IT save time and refocus its resources on strategic projects , to support more innovative services for citizens and the local business community .
“ We were fortunate that we architected our team at the same time we architected our system ,” said Roberts . “ We are much more of a solutions team now . We spend a lot more time supporting new projects and new services , rather than running around pre-empting the next thing that is going to break . We used to have to come in on weekends and nights to respond to issues and outages . That ’ s rare now .”
Next steps
With its scalable infrastructure in place , the City of Unley can choose from several options as it extends its solution for future challenges . “ We are considering implementing the Acropolis AHV hypervisor , which could free up additional licensing costs that we could re-invest ,” said Roberts .
The city is also exploring use of hybrid cloud solutions and is pleased that Nutanix can smoothly adapt to fit a variety of architectures .
“ The flexibility of Nutanix could allow us to get the best of both worlds , which really aligns with our needs ,” adds Roberts . p
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