The Future of Enterprise

Applications in the Public Sector

 The Future of Enterprise Applications in the Public Sector

The Future of Enterprise

Applications in the Public Sector
IT TRENDS IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR
CIOs and IT professionals in educational institutions and government agencies are under more
pressure than ever before. Not only are they being asked to support all of the organization’s
existing applications and services, they must also be prepared for the future. Resource-intensive
enterprise applications, including Microsoft Exchange and Lync, and a wide range of more
sophisticated GIS, messaging, and enterprise collaboration apps, are all stretching the limits of
the organization’s existing IT infrastructure. In order to survive in the digital age, public sector
organizations must identify and implement robust infrastructure solutions that will enable them to
meet their IT priorities of increased cyber security, mobility, and the uninterrupted continuity of
operations for all key applications and services.

Public sector CIOs and other IT leaders increasingly recognize that their legacy data centers
have reached their limits, making it difficult or impossible to meet end user demands and
expectations for service. For example, more than half of the respondents in a survey conducted
by the Center for Digital Government in 2015 indicated that their organization’s primary data
center does not fully meet their current needs for data, storage, or security. Additionally, 29
percent of survey respondents indicated they were already using a private cloud for some data
center functions.

Public sector IT departments need to prioritize their investments in data center consolidation
and new technologies to enable higher IT service levels within budgetary constraints. The
National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) reported that state govern-
ment CIOs ranked IT consolidation and optimization among their top priorities for 2015.
In order to address these trends, many public sector IT teams are now launching the following
initiatives: Evolving the Data Center to Hyperconvergence for Virtualization and Cloud; Delivering
Private Cloud and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS); Delivering Any Application, at Any Scale;
and Improving IT Operational Efficiency.

TREND 1: EVOLVING THE DATA CENTER TO HYPERCONVERGENCE FOR VIRTUALIZATION

AND CLOUD
The traditional image of a data center is a cavernous room filled with rows of equipment racks
and whirring, blinking boxes. This reality is fast disappearing as advances in virtualization
technology pack more capabilities into a dense form factor. Public sector data centers are now
evolving to take advantage of virtualization, especially for servers and storage. Their goal is to
capture the associated benefits of higher data center efficiency and optimization, and to reduce
capital and operational expenses.

Virtualization enables a hyperconverged infrastructure that integrates servers and storage into a
single appliance. These systems leverage industry-standard hardware and software-defined
storage (SDS), while enabling easy scalability and management. This model replaces the
expense and complexity of traditional storage-area networking (SAN) and network-attached
storage (NAS) systems, which use separate hardware and management. The software-defined
storage pools the storage and coordinates the operations across all hosts in the cluster. New
capabilities are efficiently delivered as upgrades to software, avoiding the expense, downtime,
and disruption of traditional hardware upgrades.

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 The Future of Enterprise Applications in the Public Sector

Well-designed hyperconvergence infrastructure in the data center offers several additional

advantages for IT operations and service delivery:

• Cost reductions for infrastructure, software licenses, cabling, and other elements, with
predictable budgeting for data center growth

• Easier, on-demand and linear scalability of compute and storage resources, which reduces
the need to overprovision resources in anticipation of potential performance demands

• Flexibility to support new IT offerings from different vendors, (e.g., more advanced analytics
applications) that allow public sector employees to improve service to their constituents

• Simpler management, with fewer server and storage silos and a self-healing server
cluster design

How Hyperconvergence Reduces TCO

Lower Capex Lower Opex

Fewer physical servers Fewer license for operating system,
database and application instances
Eliminate standalone storage systems Reduced costs for power and
cooling consumption
 educed need for cabling; equipment
R Lower requirements for infrastructure
racks; and elements for power, maintenance and support
cooling and connectivity
 maller datacenter or equipment
S
room footprint

William Jessup University

Many of these advantages were recently gained in an installation at William Jessup University,
where the server and storage infrastructure was straining to keep up with fast-growing student
enrollment and new academic programs. By implementing a hyperconverged solution, the
university now has a single platform for storage and compute resources that enables high-avail-
ability operations. The solution also reduced rack space by 94 percent and produced 88 percent
savings in power costs.

Cochise County
The Cochise County government in Arizona has also realized notable results from its
deployment of a hyperconverged platform to replace aging physical servers. In its newly
virtualized data center, the county has achieved a 6:1 reduction in rack space and an 80
percent decrease in power and cooling costs, due to the reduction in hardware required to
meet their computing needs.

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 The Future of Enterprise Applications in the Public Sector

TREND 2: DELIVERING PRIVATE CLOUD AND INFRASTRUCTURE AS A SERVICE (IAAS)

One key to agility—for resource-constrained public sector organizations as well as their IT
teams—is having the right resources always on-call at a moment’s notice, and to use them only
when they are truly needed. That agility is the essence of IaaS on a hyperconverged infrastruc-
ture: reliably delivering computing, storage, and network resources on demand to application
developers and users.

This environment operates like a private cloud, where the IT infrastructure can serve more
applications and users without the need to add more staff. By creating a private internal cloud,
IT managers also can reduce concerns that come with using untrusted or shared cloud services,
including security, compliance, and audit trails.

IaaS on Nutanix enterprise clouds enables IT departments to create packages of server and
storage resources that meet specific applications or variable demand levels. As a result, IT can
automate many operational tasks around provisioning and orchestration, which makes it easier
to activate or repurpose servers as needed. Additionally, the automated configuration and
management of IT resources means IT staff can focus on more strategic, high-value activities.

California Office of Emergency Services

The California Office of Emergency Services uses an IaaS on hyperconverged infrastructure
concept to maintain a virtualized environment in more than 100 offices statewide. By using
hyperconverged appliances, the agency is able to quickly activate services for its remote offices
and has obtained a 25 percent reduction in capital expense and 50 percent savings for power in
its larger, primary centers.

San Mateo County

Also in California, San Mateo County is converting existing PCs to support persistent virtual
desktops that obtain applications, data, and configurations dynamically from the data center.
This implementation costs less than replacing all of the physical PCs, and County employees
gain mobility through access to their desktop software, documents, and data when away from
the office.

TREND 3: DELIVERING ANY APPLICATION, AT ANY SCALE

From a smartphone app used by one employee, to a complex information system used by
hundreds, the ability to deliver any application at any scale is essential for today’s public sector
IT departments. This ever-expanding scalability requires an infrastructure that can quickly deliver
the right resources for compute requirements, storage capacity, and application performance.
Different applications commonly used for public sector functions understandably require different
types of resources and performance levels. For example, a GIS application needs more storage
capacity than compute capability, while transaction-oriented applications are often compute-in-
tensive and don’t require as much data storage.

Hastings and Prince Edward Counties Health Unit

Adoption of hosted virtual desktops prompted the move to hyperconverged infrastructure by the
Hastings & Prince Edward Counties Health Unit in Ontario, Canada. With this platform, the IT
department has now easily and quickly scaled to deliver 50 percent faster desktop performance
during peak times, as well as higher overall system availability.

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 The Future of Enterprise Applications in the Public Sector

Joseph Chamberlain College

Building an IT infrastructure that can support the high—yet very different—demands of its
Microsoft SQL systems and MS Exchange environment was the challenge facing Joseph
Chamberlain College in Birmingham, United Kingdom. The IT team needed servers and
storage that could reliably handle the heavy stresses of very high use. After deploying its
hyperconverged solution, the college easily meets current demands and can support new
applications with a 95 percent improvement in provisioning time for new virtual machines.

TREND 4: IMPROVING IT OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY

As technology becomes a bigger part of delivering, supporting, and assessing public sector
applications and services, IT departments must continually meet the demands for more effective
resources from their end users. The catch? There usually isn’t a commensurate rise in budgets,
so IT can’t always add new staff to maintain and manage those resources.

This challenge can be overcome when more intelligence is built into the IT infrastructure. More
sophisticated infrastructure enables IT to automate or even eliminate many tasks, such as
storage provisioning and tuning. The time savings from automation allows IT staff to focus on
improving service delivery and performance.

Blue Springs School District

Managing the separate server and storage systems in each school required a lot of time for
the IT team in Missouri’s Blue Springs School District. When the servers were scheduled for
replacement, the team determined that creating a central data center for the district would be
simpler to manage, and at the same time, reduce costs. Using a hyperconverged infrastructure
allowed the district to consolidate all of its servers and storage in a single central rack, which
simplified training and management activity for the IT staff. It also avoided problems caused by
inconsistent processes and implementations in each school.

Nutanix Enterprise Clouds

Many IT departments within the public sector have already turned to Nutanix architecture
to address the challenges covered in this document. Nutanix delivers invisible infrastructure
for next-generation enterprise computing by natively converging compute, storage, and
virtualization into a turnkey hyperconverged solution with consumer-grade design for
management. The world’s most advanced enterprise datacenters now rely on Nutanix
web-scale technology to power their mission-critical workloads at any scale.

One-click
Infrastructure App Mobility Fabric
Management
Workload mobility | Extensibility | No Lock-in | Always On | API
Acropolis
Prism

One-click
Operational
Insights
Distributed Storage Fabric
Web-Scale Core | Compression | Dedupe | Tiering | Resiliency | Data Protection
One-click
Remedication

VMware® Microsoft® Nutanix

ESXi Hyper-V AHV
Amazon Microsoft®
Web Services™ Azure

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 The Future of Enterprise Applications in the Public Sector

The hyperconverged storage and virtualization stack from Nutanix eliminates the bloat of legacy
standalone hypervisors and makes virtualization invisible. Designed to run on an intelligent,
VM-centric storage layer, the built-in Nutanix AHV delivers stable, secure computing services.
The tightly integrated management platform delivers true one-click infrastructure management,
operational insights, and remediation.

Nutanix solution benefits include:

• LOWER COSTS: 40%-60% reduction in overall CapEx and OpEx

• HIGHER ROI: Measured 510% over 5 years

• LIMITLESS SCALABILITY: Scale infrastructure predictably

• FASTEST TIME-TO-VALUE: 8x faster buying, deploying, and managing

SIMPLIFIED MANAGEMENT WITH NUTANIX PRISM: A single platform for all

• 
application workloads

The Journey to Enterprise Clouds

Enterprise Clouds using Invisible Infrastructure offer a wide range of possibilities for the state
and local government agencies and educational institutions for applications and workloads such
as enterprise application and databases, VDI, private cloud and big data. Nutanix Enterprise
Cloud replaces the complexity of legacy infrastructure with web-scale building blocks that
eliminate silos of infrastructure, increase resource utilization, and scale into the future without
wholesale replacement. It comprises of the following:

• LOWER COSTS: 40%-60%

NUTANIX ACROPOLIS: Brings together all the storage, compute, and virtualization services
• 
needed to support your enterprise applications with predictable, scalable performance, a full
suite of data protection services including asynchronous and synchronous replication,
compression, deduplication, and much more. It lets you move applications seamlessly
between nodes—and between hypervisors. You choose the hypervisor that best meets your
needs, whether it’s lead with AHV, VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, or AHV, with the
freedom to migrate from one to the other as needs change.

NUTANIX PRISM: Delivers a superior management experience with consumer-grade design

• 
that lets you accomplish complete infrastructure and virtualization management, gain access
to operational insights, and fix problems with a single click.

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 The Future of Enterprise Applications in the Public Sector

When It Is Time to Change

It should come as no surprise that Nutanix has put a lot of thought into figuring out the best
ways for public sector organizations to move to Invisible Infrastructure:. Here are steps you can
take to begin your journey to datacenter transformation:

Step 1: Understanding Your Current Environment

The process starts with a full understanding of your current environment including:

• APPLICATION-SPECIFIC METRICS: Gather the steady state statistics and trends for
each application to be moved as well as working set size, execution times for any batch
processes, and average and peak transactions per second.

INFRASTRUCTURE-SPECIFIC METRICS: Gather appropriate specifications, utilization, and

• 
capacity for server CPUs and memory, networks, and storage. Also gather performance
metrics, latency, throughput, etc.

MAPPING EVERYTHING TO SERVICE OWNERS: Accountability is a key success factor.

• 

Step 2: Sizing the New Environment

The next step is to accurately size your new environment. Nutanix Sizer makes this task
straightforward, but keep these guidelines in mind:

• 
The working set requiring low latency access should fit into the flash tier

• 
Always factor in HA for both compute and storage

• 
Additional infrastructure and/or additional clusters may be required based on the
following considerations:
° Business: SLAs, licensing, security, budget, and politics
° Technical: locality, cache amplification, traffic patterns, and affinity

Step 3: Planning the Migration

You should follow Nutanix application-specific best practices and guidelines and be sure and
use Nutanix, partner, and native tools such as Storage vMotion whenever possible.

Step 4: Validating the New Environment Post Migration

The fourth step is to ensure your Nutanix environment is running optimally. Nutanix Global
Services can help you maximize your Nutanix environment to put you on a path to greater
infrastructure success.

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 The Future of Enterprise Applications in the Public Sector

Nutanix Public Sector

Customer Stories
THE TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY SYSTEM
Texas A&M virtualized its IT environment several years ago using VMware vSphere and EMC
VNX storage systems. “We had a lot of trouble with that platform,” explained Cary Tschirhart, IT
manager. “We spent hours trying to troubleshoot issues but could never identify the source of
any performance problems.”

Texas A&M made the decision to upgrade its EMC storage systems to the Nutanix Enterprise
Cloud Platform in 2012. All workloads are now running on Nutanix, including its MS SQL Server
databases, payroll and HR systems, and several internally developed applications. Texas A&M
also implemented MS Exchange 2013 on XCP for hundreds of end users on Nutanix. “Keeping
up with the EMC systems was a full time job,” noted Tschirhart. “With Nutanix, I don’t have to
worry about LUNs anymore. I just create applications, put them online, and go home and relax
at the end of the day.”

Texas A&M upgraded to NX-3000 series systems and migrated from VMware to Nutanix’s
built-in Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) in 2015. By migrating to AHV, Texas A&M was able to
eliminate all licensing fees for its VMware vSphere, SQL Server databases (related to the
VMware server), Veeam, backup to Data Domain, and legacy servers, enabling them to save
tens of thousands of dollars in ongoing expenses every year. “Nutanix is enabling us to keep up
with our fast growth rate with a very small IT team. This would not have been possible without
Nutanix and its Acropolis Hypervisor,” concluded Tschirhart.

THE CITY OF WESTFIELD MASSACHUSETTS

The City of Westfield is a growing community of 41,000 residents located in the foothills of
Western Massachusetts. The City’s IT department supports 33 remote sites, 2,500 end users,
and 5,800 students. When the City’s existing HP EVA storage environment was reaching
end-of-life, the IT team made the decision to upgrade to Nutanix. “We replaced half a rack of HP
equipment with just 2u of Nutanix—with room to spare,” noted Lenore Bernashe, IT manager.
“We now have 50 VMs running on the NX-3360 system, including our Windows-based
environment, Active Directory, and our file servers.”

The City of Westfield was able to power-down four HP blades by moving to Nutanix.
Releasing the extra VMware licenses substantially reduced its recurring costs for support
and maintenance. “Everything runs much faster on Nutanix, especially our financial services
application,” Bernashe said. “Reports that used to take 10 minutes on HP finish in just a minute
or two on Nutanix. We can also see much more detail at the storage and VM level than we could
with HP. By opening the Prism interface, I can immediately see that everything is up and running
with no problems. The increased visibility and simplicity of the architecture have significantly
reduced the amount of time I spend managing the storage and VMs. Nutanix is enabling us to
launch new services for all of our constituents very quickly now.”

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 The Future of Enterprise Applications in the Public Sector

HARRIS COUNTY, TEXAS OFFICE OF THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY

Harris County DA’s Office investigates and prosecutes over 110,000 criminal cases every year
with a staff of 300 assistant DAs and 300 support personnel. The DA’s previous IT environment
consisted of individual rack mounted servers connected to a legacy SAN and the VMware
vSphere hypervisor. “We had plans to implement Citrix XenApp, XenDesktop, and Microsoft
Lync for our users, and upgrade to MS Exchange 2016. But there was absolutely no way we
were going to accomplish all of those goals with our existing storage arrays,” explained Rurik
Wilmot, senior technology analyst for Harrison County DA.

Wilmot narrowed the search for new infrastructure down to two technology stacks—
hyperconverged systems or traditional 3-tier architectures. When he added up the costs of all
the different systems needed and looked at manageability of the two approaches, the Dell
XC730 systems powered by Nutanix Acropolis emerged as the obvious choice. “With its high
performance, ease of implementation, price, and one-vendor support, we were convinced that
the Dell XC Series would fit the bill.” All production workloads have now been migrated to the
Dell cluster. Harris County also added two more Dell XC730 appliances for production and four
XC730 systems for DR. By moving to the hyperconverged platform, the DA’s Office was able to
reduce its datacenter footprint from 84U down to 16U.

“Our goal is to move away from VMware ESXi and migrate to the Nutanix Acropolis
Hypervisor (AHV) to save on licensing costs,” noted Wilmot. “We like the fact that AHV is ‘
baked into’ Nutanix Acropolis, so we won’t have to purchase and integrate any 3rd-party
products. Plus, Nutanix Prism gives us a single management pane for administering the
entire infrastructure stack.”

Harris County is getting ready to launch its new Citrix application and desktop virtualization and
delivery project. After the XenApp launch, they plan to implement 1,000 virtual desktops on
Nutanix. The Dell XC Series will also serve as the archival target for the County’s new police
officer body camera video application.

T. 855.NUTANIX (855.688.2649) | F. 408.916.4039

info@Nutanix.com | www.nutanix.com | @nutanix

Nutanix delivers invisible infrastructure for next-generation enterprise computing, elevating IT to focus on the
applications and services that power their business. The company’s software-driven Xtreme Computing Platform
natively converges compute, virtualization and storage into a single solution to drive simplicity in the datacenter.
Using Nutanix, customers benefit from predictable performance, linear scalability and cloud-like infrastructure
consumption. Learn more at www.nutanix.com or follow us on Twitter@nutanix.

©2016 Nutanix, Inc. All rights reserved. Nutanix is a trademark of Nutanix, Inc., registered in the United States
and other countries. All other brand names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be
the trademarks of their respective holder(s).