FEATURE
Business need
As a modern, forward-thinking city
authority, Manchester City Council has
ambitious plans to take advantage of
technological advances to meet the
challenges of its increasingly diverse and
mobile population.
At the same time, however, it has to
meet the immediate needs of city
residents and do so against a background
of strict financial constraints, onerous
governance requirements and rapidly
escalating demand in sectors as diverse
as transport, recycling, housing and adult
social care.
Solution
To future-proof its investment and deliver
maximum agility, the council decided to
build its replacement infrastructure around
cloud and software defined technologies.
Balancing these demands meant replacing
legacy IT infrastructure and doing so with
regard to the UK government’s Cloud First
policy, whereby public sector organisations
are required to fully evaluate potential
cloud solutions before any other option. It opted for Cisco ACI (Application Centric
Infrastructure) for software-defined
networking and also evaluated a number
of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI)
solutions to virtualise, manage and secure
compute and storage resources.
As such the council established a five-year
strategy to build a more agile, flexible and
highly available infrastructure based on
a mix of cloud computing and software-
defined data centre technologies. With its emphasis on delivering the
benefits of a public cloud approach in a
secure enterprise environment, the council
decided that the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud
was the best fit for its requirements.
Rather than public cloud only however,
the council opted to put an on-premise
hyper-converged infrastructure at the
heart of its strategy and, following
an open tender procedure, chose the
Nutanix Enterprise Cloud as the best way
of achieving that goal. 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.
With the first phase of implementation
now almost complete, the council is
reaping the rewards of this ambitious
project in terms of lower total cost of
ownership, improved performance and
vastly enhanced availability. “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.”
Moreover, it is moving ahead with plans to
exploit other advantages conferred by its
investment in the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud.
Challenge
One of the biggest local government
contracts to be awarded in the UK, the
Manchester City Council infrastructure
project was initiated in the wake of
escalating maintenance, management and
support issues with its legacy IT platforms.
www.intelligentdatacentres.com
A fundamental requirement was a move
away from a conventional on-premise
data centre to a hyper-converged
infrastructure distributed across two
new co-location facilities with the aim
of building a scalable, robust and highly
resilient infrastructure to meet both the
immediate and ambitious long term IT
needs of the council and the population
it serves.
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%.
Issue 04
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