FEATURE
objectives and desire to be at the cutting
edge which set Nutanix apart from other
technical solutions.
Mike Farrington, Technical Operations
Manager, Manchester City Council
This has contributed to an annual saving
of £285k 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 (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
46
Issue 04
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 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). ◊
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.
www.intelligentdatacentres.com