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The local authority has harnessed a Nutanix solution as part of a new IT infrastructure developed for long term flexibility and scalability
‘Cloud first’ has provided a rallying cry for the public sector, but there are often more effective ways of exploiting the possibilities than a straightforward rush to public cloud.
Manchester City Council has shown what can be achieved with the adoption of a hyperconverged infrastructure and a combination of cloud and software defined data technologies.
The move, which began in 2018, derived from its need to move on from a legacy infrastructure built on an on-premise datacentre, that was causing maintenance, management and support issues - and threatened to limit the council’s scope for adopting new technologies. It wanted to give itself maximum agility, scalability and to future proof its investment, and decided on a move to a hyperconverged infrastructure – in which all the elements are defined by software rather than hardware and run on virtual machines.
After scanning the market it opted for Cisco ACI (Application Centric Infrastructure) for software defined networking and the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud for hyperconvergence.
Mike Farrington, the council’s technical operations manager, says: “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. These include the ongoing Manchester Smarter City Programme aimed at optimising city systems and ultimately improving how people live, work and play in and around the Manchester area.”
Major migration
Installation of the Nutanix solution took just a few days, followed by the migration of more than 900 application workloads over the next four months. The council also migrated from VMWare to the Nutanix AHV Hypervisor for running virtual machines, and it is looking to use the Enterprise Cloud to evaluate and deploy new technologies.
These could include public cloud platforms as the council explores which are appropriate for specific applications – effectively supporting a hybrid cloud model that can evolve over time – along with plans for the internet of things and artificial intelligence.
Manchester has identified a number of benefits from the change, including savings estimated at £285,000 per year in support, maintenance, power and cooling costs. It has also increased its capacity to scale up and adapt services to changes in demand, reduced the risk to critical applications, given itself access to new tools and technologies, and provided the scope for multi-tenancy arrangements to improve collaboration with other public authorities.
Andrew Puddephatt, head of public sector at Nutanix, points to public authorities’ increasing interest in this approach: “Manchester has architected on hyperconverged infrastructure, effectively operating as a private cloud for delivering services to citizens. But they are also embracing public cloud where appropriate and have the ability to deal with all the major public cloud vendors.
“They have very much taken a hybrid view; most of it right now sits on premises but they can adopt new solutions as they want."
Adds Puddephatt, “In pretty much every conversation we have with public sector entities it emerges that they are landing on a hybrid model.
“The generally accepted definition of hybrid is having both a private, on-premise cloud platform, and utilising public cloud. The key therefore is having the ability to manage workloads, applications and services across the two.”
Manchester City Council and Nutanix have compiled a case study outlining the council's journey to public cloud and subsequent repatriation - click start to fill in the form below to download and read their story:
