Fast-growing city relies on Nutanix to keep pace with change and enable a small IT team to deliver vital services.
Located in the Toronto area, the City of Markham is home to more than 357,000 people. It is also a hub for corporate head offices and more than 1,000 high tech and life science companies. Founded in the 1790s, Markham is one of Canada's most diverse communities, with a strong local economy, and a rich history. To support its award-winning community planning and citizen services, Markham depends on its network infrastructure. When its virtualized environment could no longer keep pace with the city’s rapid expansion, the IT team migrated to a Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure solution. This migration helped to improve performance, simplify administration, and improve scalability.
The Nutanix platform gives us the tools we need to keep our systems up to date seamlessly. We are building resiliency and increasing our uptime for our services on a platform that’s a lot easier to administer, so we can keep the lights running.
Like most public sector organizations, the City of Markham relies on its infrastructure to support the services that citizens and employees depend on daily.
“We are the centralized IT department for the city,” said Sumon Acharjee, Chief Information Officer at the City of Markham. “Everything from our Operations department, to Waste to Environmental Services is managed through our IT department, on our common infrastructure.”
The City has experienced rapid growth in recent years, putting pressure on its infrastructure and our team to grow with it. Although its environment was highly virtualized, its existing solutions were beginning to show their age. Some of the organization’s devices had reached end of life, and support was no longer available.
“We had aging hardware and faced challenges with the administrative overhead of managing our VMware environment, our SAN, and our servers,” said Sugun Rao, Technology Manager at the City of Markham. “Our data was growing and we kept adding drives to our storage. Our small staff of three were not able to keep up with upgrading the firmware and other aspects of the environment, and we also faced capacity issues with our CPU, network, and storage.”
The capacity problems became especially acute during peak periods, leading to poor service experiences, and additional strains on the IT team and administrators.
“We have periodic spikes for services requests during snow storms, registration days whereby our citizens register for things like swimming classes,” said Alshad Damji, IT Advisor at the City of Markham. “Because we were already facing capacity challenges, those spikes in demand made problems especially apparent, and would sometimes result in lost revenue. If citizens could not register online, they would try to reach us by phone, and the issue spilled into our contact centres.”
To continue to deliver the highest caliber of services to citizens, the City turned to its partner ITI, a leading Canadian IT solutions provider, for advice on updating its infrastructure. After considering a variety of options, the City of Markham selected the Nutanix Cloud Platform.
“We liked Nutanix because it was able to support both vertical and horizontal scaling, with one console that manages everything—not only our VMs but also storage,” said Rao. “That means less administrative overhead and better monitoring and system reporting, which were capabilities we didn’t have on the VMware environment.”
“Price point was another element in our decision, and the fact that Nutanix provides a complete package was a key component as well,” added Acharjee.
ITI played a key role in helping the City align the environment to their specific needs, and smoothly migrate its infrastructure and applications to the new platform.
“Setting up the Nutanix platform was very smooth, and the team and the knowledge transfer that ITI brought in was really amazing,” said Acharjee.
Nutanix has delivered the agility and scalability that the City of Markham needed to keep pace with rapid change. “We had faced a lot of challenges in patching and keeping our systems up to date,” said Acharjee. “Nutanix lets us automate many routine tasks. For example, we no longer have to worry about taking a snapshot of VMs prior to patching, as we did with VMware. That was eliminated once we moved to Nutanix.”
“Nutanix also enhances our lifecycle replacement capabilities, providing the ease of replacing hardware without any disruption on our services—and the services that we provide to our citizens,” said Rao.
Consolidating its infrastructure onto a single hyperconverged environment has enabled the City to improve its efficiency, reduce power consumption, and enhance overall sustainability.
“We used to have several racks of equipment house our various servers, and when deployment is complete we will have only minimal racks, reducing our data center footprint by about 40 per cent,” said Rao.
Perhaps best of all, the departments that the IT team serves are experiencing more dependable performance, so they can focus on enhancing services and applications, instead of spending time troubleshooting.
“After the implementation, one of Sugun’s team members told me how thankful he has been with the investment in new technology,” said Acharjee. “He feels very well supported, and his team can move from constant firefighting to a more proactive stance. He has the tools, he has the training, and the support to keep things going smoothly.”
“It has been a seamless partnership with Nutanix in terms of health checks, and our account team have been fantastic,” said Damji. “In many cases, they’ll proactively remind us to get back in touch with them or keep them up to speed on an issue. We’ve experienced a satisfying trilateral partnership between the City, ITI, and Nutanix.”
Learn more at www.nutanix.com
ITI is a leading Canadian IT solutions provider offering tailored solutions to support customers in their technology transformation and drive an increase in business efficiency. The company relies on the contribution of more than 400 employees to serve more than 1,500 customers in the public and private sectors.
04/2024
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