The IT team performed a seven-month analysis of different environments (from full cloud to hybrid), analyzed a half-dozen platforms, projected total-cost-of-ownership (TOC), evaluated feature parity, and mapped out every risk.
Ultimately, they settled on Nutanix; Lloyd cited the company’s ability to quickly answer their key questions, collaborate, strategize on AI ambitions, and offer an extensible environment for numerous departments and use cases.
Within a year, the city successfully migrated 2,500 legacy VMs to the Nutanix Cloud Platform, all while keeping services online. They quickly saw benefits in speed, uptime, and costs.
From a cybersecurity perspective, Lloyd said that Nutanix baked encryption and microsegmentation directly into the hypervisor, and provided native support for federal security standards and automated containerization.
Ultimately, the city is saving between $1.6 and $2 million a year with Nutanix; this is not only due to the reduction of systems and servers, but lower licensing costs and “efficiency plays and optimization,” Lloyd said.
“One of the objectives in the project is, how can we actually see bloat over the years, subtract that and yield that savings back to the environment?,” he said. Now, they have visibility into network performance and can optimize as needed.
