XMA wins Stockport council data centre deal with Nutanix

IT services firm XMA has signed a major Nutanix data centre infrastructure deal at Stockport Council in Greater Manchester.

The Nutanix enterprise cloud computing kit is supporting Stockport Council’s drive to digital services for 286,000 residents across the borough.

Nutanix’s enterprise cloud will be the background of the council’s Digital by Design programme, which aims to improve access to services through a new website and make better use of the data the council holds.

The Nutanix solution consolidates computing, virtualisation and storage into a single and scalable appliance, replacing the local authority’s ageing legacy SAN architecture, which had become slow, inflexible and expensive to operate and maintain.

In a competitive tender process, incumbent supplier XMA steered the council towards the web-scale capabilities of Nutanix, confident that the agility afforded by a configurable network system was best-equipped to meet the demands of an unpredictable and evolving public sector environment.

Based on a pay-as-you-grow model, the virtual desktop environment can be scaled up by additional computing modes, which negates the use and expense of the specialist teams which managed the previous infrastructure.

Speed and efficiency is backed by the approach to data recovery and backup. Previously, a third party would be used to rebuild the server from scratch over five days, a process that now takes just a few hours, which also translates to a major cost saving.

This web-scale IT approach is more associated with the global cloud services of Google, Amazon and Facebook and represents significant new territory for the council.

The enterprise cloud solution will power the council’s two data centres, which handle disaster recovery and production respectively, while reducing the data centre footprint by 20x with the previous 10 racks condensed to half a rack.

Stockport Council’s IT operations manager, Adrian Davies, said: “Local public services are experiencing significant change and it’s hard to know what the service requirements will be over the next five years.

“We need a highly flexible cloud solution that will evolve as the requirements of the council change. It needs to support potential expansion, collaboration with partners and the demands of new ways of working, all without disruption to services.”

Davies said: “Software defined environments seem to be increasing in popularity and we expect them to gain more mainstream traction in the public sector.”

Paul Phillips, regional director at Nutanix, said: “This really exemplifies how a compact solution can make a very big impact, particularly in a challenging public sector environment.”

@AntonySavvas