Customers

Pennsylvania House of Representatives Democrats Rely on Nutanix Enterprise Cloud

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AHV Adopted by the Pennsylvania House of Representatives Democrats

The Pennsylvania House of Representatives Democrats now relies on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud. Watch this panel discussion to learn about this teams journey and experiences with Nutanix and adopting AHV as well as the recent addition of Frame. “The confidence that it has instilled in us as a rock-solid hypervisor has led us to consider using Nutanix Files and Nutanix Volumes at our new data center" says Astree.

INDUSTRY

Government

BENEFITS

  • Consolidated disparate infrastructure environments to enhance application performance
  • Simplified administration to provide a one-stop shop for daily tasks, freeing up IT resources
  • Implemented a scalable foundation to support new services like disaster recovery and enterprise file services and storage
  • Legacy piecemeal infrastructure had degraded application performance
  • Needed to incorporate new services like disaster recovery and enterprise file services and storage
  • IT staff stretched thin just supporting daily tasks

SOLUTION

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform

Applications

  • Constituent service tracking software

BUSINESS BENEFITS

The Democratic caucus of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives relies on its hyperconverged infrastructure to support critical constituent services, but managing it was slow and manual. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud consolidates management tasks, while providing the flexibility and automation the organization needs to deliver consistent performance. “We have more than enough work to do, and Nutanix frees us to focus on our primary mission of delivering constituent services, instead of having to constantly cradle our network environment so we don’t experience service issues and outages,” said Kevin Astree, Network and Systems Manager at Pennsylvania House of Representatives Democratic Caucus.

We had been supporting several disparate environments, and now we can unify everything under Nutanix. We have already seen improvements in stability for our application servers. You can’t put a dollar amount on the value of a missed opportunity for a legislator to serve a constituent.

Yuri Topolnicki, Senior Network Administrator, Pennsylvania House of Representatives Democratic Caucus

CHALLENGE

The Democratic caucus of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives is dedicated to serving the state’s 12 million citizens, and it depends on technology to support its mission. The 93 state representatives in the caucus each represent an average of 60,000 residents, and they rely on an advanced software application to engage and respond to constituents. “Our network infrastructure hosts the software system that we have developed in house to aid district offices and staff, relay the needs and wants of constituents, and assist them with services like vehicle registration, voter issues, and community issues,” said Yuri Topolnicki, Senior Network Administrator at Pennsylvania House of Representatives Democratic Caucus. “This constituent service tracking software is the core of what makes our legislative functions operate.”

SOLUTION

The House of Representatives Democratic Caucus is continually refreshing its infrastructure to maximize performance and efficiency. As the organization planned to deploy a new data center, it decided to standardize operations on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform. “Nutanix was an attractive solution because it enabled us to expand our existing hyperconverged environment now, was fully compatible with our investment in Cisco UCS servers, and positioned us to grow in the future,” said Astree.

Making the switch to Nutanix was fast and easy as the team migrated the organization’s VMware ESXi workloads, as well approximately 100 Microsoft Hyper-V VMs, to the Nutanix AHV hypervisor. “Once the hardware was onsite and integrated into our network, the process was fairly painless,” explained Topolnicki. “We had a fully operational hyperconverged solution in place within about a day, and we were ready to begin migrating our existing workloads to the new platform. Nutanix provided step-by-step guidance on what to do and how to do it.”

CUSTOMER OUTCOME

Consolidating its diverse infrastructure components onto a single hyperconverged platform has enabled House of Representative Democrats to dramatically reduce performance-related service issues. “We appreciate the time saved and the sheer reliability of the system,” said Topolnicki. “The reliability of the way the Nutanix Control VMs work together, and the rock-solid hypervisor, has given us the best of both worlds.”

“We get more than just improved performance,” added Astree. “With Nutanix, we don’t have to go to separate islands of administration just to get a simple operation accomplished. Nutanix Prism essentially offers a one-stop shop to do exactly what you need. That’s near priceless.”

“Nutanix Prism gives administrators of all levels great control over their experience,” explained Topolnicki. “It’s simple for regular operators to use on a daily basis, while allowing more advanced users to access that same pane of glass to support advanced reporting and other capabilities with APIs.”

NEXT STEPS

“Every time I have a conversation with our Nutanix representatives, I’m presented with brand new features, baked into the platform, that we can utilize to optimize our environment,” says Astree. “The value add just continues to grow.” The improved efficiency enabled by the solution has led Astree and his team to explore expanding the solution. “The confidence that it has instilled in us as a rock-solid hypervisor has led us to consider using Nutanix Files and Nutanix Volumes at our new data center,” he said. “Furthermore, we leverage the cloud for our business continuity and disaster recovery operations, and we are intrigued at the possibilities of Nutanix Xi Cloud Services to provide the resilience we need.”