Queensland’s Fraser Coast Regional Council has deployed the Nutanix enterprise cloud platform to replace an outdated three-tier storage area network and blade server infrastructure in a move expected to reduce the risk of outages on its network.
Located in the Wide Bay-Burnett region of Queensland, the council is in an area prone to flooding, which carries a risk of outages in its primary data centre.
Previously, the council’s back-up data centre was not equipped to quickly take on workloads in the event of a flood or another disaster and it was concerned an outage could leave more than 100,000 of its citizens unable to access external services such as online mapping, and seriously impact its own ability to operate internally.
The council says the Nutanix enterprise cloud platform, now operating in both the primary and secondary data centre, has reduced this risk.
{loadposition peter}“Three words come to mind when I think of Nutanix – it just works,” said Wade Rogers, executive manager information services, Fraser Coast Regional Council.
“We don’t touch it and we don’t need to tweak it in any way. Being able to move workloads quickly in the event of a disaster is a huge relief, and we’ve saved a ton of storage space with deduplication and compression, which has taken the pressure out of our datacentres.
“The real benefits though, are in the infrastructure management time it’s created, enabling us to roll out projects that we expected wouldn’t have even started yet. We can also be of greater service to the community in areas such as the provision of CCTV. Simply put, we have more resources and can respond better to the community’s needs.”
Nutanix says that since the deployment, the council has recorded 45% savings in storage capacity through deduplication and compression in its primary data centre, and 26% savings in storage capacity in its secondary data centre – and cloning of virtual machine (VM) guests has gone from five minutes down to less than one, and the physical space used in both data centres has decreased in total by 60%.
“Nutanix has vast experience working with local councils in Australia and across the world,” said Matt Young, SVP and head of APJ, Nutanix.
“We pride ourselves on the way we simplify data centres, so our customers can focus on more meaningful and innovative tasks that add value to the organisations and end-users. In this case, our enterprise cloud solution helps enable better safety and more desirable community services to over 100,000 residents in Fraser Coast Council.”