Fraser Coast Regional Council Opts for Nutanix

Nutanix, Inc. announced that Fraser Coast Regional Council has deployed its Enterprise Cloud Platform in place of an outdated three-tier SAN and blade server infrastructure, reducing its risk of outage and freeing up its IT team to do more for the community.

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 datacentre. Previously, its backup datacentre was not equipped to quickly take on workloads in the event of a flood or another disaster. Such an outage could leave more than 100,000 citizens unable to access vital external services such as online mapping and seriously impact the Council’s ability to operate internally.

The Enterprise Cloud Platform, operating in both the primary and secondary datacentre, has reduced this risk. It has also freed up the Council’s 17-strong IT team to do more for the community – for example, members of the team are assisting Queensland Police in deploying CCTV cameras to monitor troubled areas reported by citizens.

The Council chose to deploy Nutanix because it could provide greater simplicity, scalability, higher performance, lower CAPEX costs and increased resilience in its primary and secondary data centres. It considered other options – including SimpliVity, Cisco Hyperflex and a more modern SAN and blade server infrastructure, before realising Nutanix was the best fit for its needs.

The Council was also attracted by Nutanix’s ability to provide its own hypervisor, Nutanix AHV, which it will likely consider within the next year. Within the next 2 years, it is also considering VDI to free up council workers to work remotely and spend more time in the community. It will also potentially move more workloads into the public cloud and feels Nutanix will be best placed to be at the centre of a hybrid cloud environment.

“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.“

The Council has upwards of 600 users across its network who rely on its applications – including SQL, ERP, Financials, Asset Management and HR apps – along with many web services like recruitment, event booking and online mapping used by its citizens. The majority are all running successfully on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform.

Since the deployment, the Council has recorded 45%  savings in storage capacity through deduplication and compression in its primary datacentre, and 26%  savings in storage capacity in its secondary datacentre. Cloning of 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 with 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. We are pleased to see an effective use of IT can bring such a positive impact to the masses.“