Nutanix all set to power Manchester City Council’s IT

Manchester City Council has made considerable savings since migrating off a traditional architecture in favour of a hyper-converged infrastructure from Nutanix

Manchester City Council is replacing legacy IT infrastructure with hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) based on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud.

It plans to swap out VMware for Nutanix’s AHV hypervisor and, by the end of the year, will be running the software to support the majority of council services across an active-active configuration based on Nutanix.

The council’s five-year support and maintenance contract on its existing IT infrastructure was up for renewal. Given that the replacement cost would have worked out at £300,000 a year, the council took the opportunity to look at different approaches to replacing its existing hardware architecture. It council assessed Nutanix, HPE SimpliVity, HPE Synergy and the VxRail appliance from Dell-EMC and VMware, but selected Nutanix running a supermicro appliance because “Nutanix offered the closest to a silver bullet – we could get everything from a single vendor”.

Mike Farringdon, Technical Operations Manager at Manchester City Council, said: “Historically, we were behind the curve. Three years ago, we ran a fairly traditional infrastructure, with separate servers and storage. We wanted to consolidate servers, simplify what we had and not replace like for like. We didn’t want a run-of-the-mill refresh – we wanted to trailblaze.”