The Nutanix enterprise cloud platform allowed an Australian local government to shrink its data center footprint by 60 percent and reduce its risk of outages.

The Fraser Coast Regional Council considered other hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) vendors, including HPE’s SimpliVity and Cisco's Hyperflex before choosing to deploy Nutanix’s technology in both its primary and secondary data centers.

Nutanix’s customer-win follows the company’s move late last year into the networking stack. While it is best known for HCI, Nutanix, which went public in September 2016, has said its long-term goal is to make the enterprise network as easy to use as public cloud services.

The Fraser Coast Regional Council, located in Queensland, is prone to flooding, and thus data center outages. The municipality said it chose Nutanix “because it could provide greater simplicity, scalability, higher performance, and increased resilience in its primary and secondary data centers.” It also liked Nutanix’s ability to provide its own hypervisor, which the council will likely consider within the next year.

The council has about 600 users across its network including Microsoft SQL, ERP, financials, asset management, and HR applications – along with web services like recruitment, event booking, and online mapping used by its citizens. The majority are now all running on the Nutanix enterprise cloud platform.

Since the deployment, the council said it recorded 45 percent savings in storage capacity — through removing duplication and through compression in its primary data center — and 26 percent savings in storage capacity in its secondary data center.

Cloning of virtual machine (VM) guests has gone from five minutes to less than one.

In addition to reducing the risk of outages, Nutanix’s HCI technology means the council’s IT team spends less time on infrastructure management.

Looking out two years, the council is also considering moving more workloads into the public cloud and using Nutanix to support this hybrid-cloud environment.