Enabling efficient communities with enterprise cloud

In today’s landscape, IT plays a critical role in enabling councils to manage their responsibilities. Manual processes are being replaced by digital applications, giving employees access to resources in the office, at home and in the field.

But despite this, many councils continue to struggle at the hands of legacy IT infrastructures that are not adaptable enough to deliver today’s applications reliably. An enterprise cloud platform provides a simple solution to this problem. An enterprise cloud platform combines the best of web-scale engineering and consumer-grade design to natively converge compute, storage, virtualisation and unstructured data management into a single, resilient, software-defined solution that is easy to manage.

The rich machine intelligence, predictable performance, cloud-like infrastructure consumption, robust security and seamless application mobility it brings enables councils to adapt and respond to changing demands and better serve the community.

This means they can virtualise server applications and traditional desktops to efficiently use infrastructure, provide consistent and reliable user experiences on a range of devices and simplify management for IT administrators because the technology runs almost invisibly.

Many councils in Australia and New Zealand have made the move to the Nutanix enterprise cloud platform.

“Nutanix stood out as the clear solution for a number of challenges we were facing, mainly due to its management simplicity, scalability and excellent visibility of server and storage workloads and trends,” Mildura Rural City Council Senior Technical Officer Greg Maiorana said.

Mildura is the largest council in Victoria, covering more than 22,000 square kilometres. This presents challenges in delivering IT services to council officers in the more remote areas.

“Nutanix runs everything — it manages our data centre, more than 100 applications, 30 remote sites connected by wide area network (WAN) and a mix of local and Citrix-powered VDI for more than 450 users,” said Maiorana. “Historically, even the simplest of upgrades might have taken three months to complete from order to implementation. Nutanix gives us the visibility to monitor trends and growth areas to ensure we are in a position to provide important upgrades instantly.

According to Maiorana, Nutanix has given the council public cloud-like performance but with on-premises presence.

“The platform has reduced the amount of storage space in our data centre by more than 80% and has given us more capacity,” he said. “Since the initial installation, we’ve already expanded our Nutanix environment with an additional host. The flexibility to expand as we need is far more efficient and cost-effective, and Nutanix’s compatibility across all major software services gives us control over how we want to grow.”

It’s a similar story in the Shire of Dardanup in Western Australia.

“Nutanix provides us with a secure on-premises enterprise cloud environment through which we deliver our key workloads and applications, including local government-specific financial management, exchange server, GIS services and SQL along with library and recreation centre management servers, among others,” Shire IT Manager Stephen Eaton said.

“It has also enabled us to run our SharePoint farm that various departments use to access all business-critical records and documents without the performance issues we were seeing with our previous infrastructure,” he added.

Dardanup is in a regional country area where connectivity is expensive and can be unreliable, and this was a big factor when choosing where to locate the council’s data centre and services. “In the past, we’ve had scenarios where we’ve been without internet for up to a week, so public cloud is not an option for us,” Eaton said, adding that because it’s a hyperconverged platform, “Nutanix has allowed us to centralise our data centre, saving two-thirds of the rack space in the process and significantly reducing maintenance times and costs.”