Nutanix helps City of Lancaster save on hypervisor and storage licensing costs, while improving performance and administration.
Overview
Lancaster is a charter city in northern Los Angeles County, in the western Mojave Desert. To support citizen services and provide information to its citizens, the City strives to keep its network infrastructure and applications performing at their best. When it was time to upgrade its existing VMware environment, IT administrators saw an opportunity to not only boost performance, but save money and work more efficiently.
The City of Lancaster consolidated its operations onto a hyperconverged Nutanix Cloud Platform solution, with a native AHV hypervisor and a rich set of supporting applications. The new solution lets the City sidestep VMware hypervisor licensing costs, while giving the city and its citizens better performance and simplified management from one dashboard.
“Across the board, our applications experienced a performance improvement going to Nutanix,” said Joe Haggard, Assistant Director of Finance, City of Lancaster. “We did our due diligence to make sure the network would provide a full robust platform for Nutanix to really shine on.”
Key Results
| Operational savings | Efficient, consistent management | Greener operation |
|---|---|---|
| Native AHV hypervisor reduces need for costly VMware licenses | Easy to manage HCI environment lets IT staff be more efficient and solve issues fast | Reduced data center footprint saves money on heating and cooling |
Nutanix provides not only serious budgetary savings, but it's also simpler to use, and has let us streamline our operations on a single pane of glass.
Challenges
With a population of more than 170,000, Lancaster is the 30th largest in California. To provide services for these citizens and support its own systems for staff, the City of Lancaster relies on an extensive network infrastructure that resides in its city hall data center.
Like many public sector organizations, the City of Lancaster is extremely budget-conscious, and is constantly exploring ways to make its operations more efficient. When its existing infrastructure began nearing end of life, the IT team saw an opportunity to not only reduce costs, but to improve the performance of its key applications.
“We were looking to replace our VMware environment,” explained Michael Sanderson, Information Technology Systems Analyst at the City of Lancaster. “It resided on eight Dell servers and Dell EqualLogic storage, which were simply aging out, so we were seeking an all-in-one replacement.”
After carefully evaluating its options, the IT team selected Nutanix as its choice because it offers a comprehensive cloud and unified data services platform that is based on HCI. This platform makes it easy to deploy and migrate, providing a solid foundation for the organization's needs.
Solution
Working closely with Nutanix professional services, the Lancaster IT team successfully moved its key applications and servers to the new platform. Nutanix Move accelerated the process, enabling the team to move VMs with minimal downtime.
“Our financial environment and ERP are all hosted on Nutanix, as well as our document management system,” said Haggard. “I immediately noticed how much simpler Nutanix and the AHV hypervisor were, compared to our previous environment.”
The IT team also added Files and Objects Services of Nutanix Unified Storage to modernize the City’s storage environments with a single, capacity-based licensing for both Files and Objects. Capable of handling petabytes of unstructured and machine-generated data, Nutanix Objects lets the storage team store and edit video content for Lancaster’s public television channel.
“It’s great to have everything integrated onto one pane of glass, so we can see and manage our infrastructure, from the servers and VMs to the software,” said Haggard. “After trying it out, we decided to purchase additional nodes to fully standardize on Nutanix for all of the City’s data center operations.”
Customer Outcome
The City of Lancaster unlocked some immediate cost benefits by migrating from VMware and its costly hypervisor licenses to the fully integrated Nutanix platform.
“We achieved a substantial savings to leverage the Nutanix AHV for our environment with what we're doing,” said Haggard. “AHV has all the features and functionality we need and has been performing as described.”
With Nutanix Prism, administrators no longer need to switch between various tools and environments to keep the infrastructure running smoothly or add new network resources.
“Working in the Nutanix Prism environment, everything is right there,” said Haggard. “You don't have to log in and out of different systems, so it makes everything much quicker, which is also a budgetary savings. Instead of having our people spend half a day working on these tasks, it is accomplished in one system in a couple minutes.”
The HCI environment has also enabled Lancaster to consolidate equipment to run a greener, leaner data center compared to its previous environment.
“Having everything condensed in the Nutanix environment has freed up a lot of physical space in the data center,” said Haggard. “We went from having a data center that was packed to a data center that provides more adequate space. It’s been helpful for cooling, and for the environment.”
Nutanix Xpert Services has been instrumental in ensuring that the solution consistently delivers the outcomes the City expects.
“Our professional support has been very good. We can get them on the phone quickly, and they are available around the clock. Our after-hours support has been especially strong,” said Sanderson.
“Our Nutanix sales support representative has been helpful, as well,” added Haggard. “We've been working with him a lot lately on sizing, and figuring out where we go from here, how we grow our footprint, and how to best decommission devices that won’t be needed.”
Next steps
Haggard and his team are continuing to build on the HCI foundation and are evaluating Nutanix Frame to support some of its workers with Desktop-as-a-Service capabilities.
“We want to leverage Frame non-persistent desktops, to provide contractors outside the office with access to standard tools and let them work in an environment that we control—but also collaborate with everyone else on the network with their physical computers, just like they're here in the building,” said Haggard.
Haggard and his team are also experimenting with persistent desktops to give certain users more control over their environments.
“We are considering providing persistent desktops to remote and part-time workers, to allow them to tailor and customize their experience to really make it their own,” he said.
The City of Lancaster and Nutanix are working together to deliver better service to citizens.