The Court of Accounts of São Paulo (TCM-SP) audits the accounts and contracts of Brazil's largest city. The organization found themselves faced with limitations imposed by their complex and difficult to manage technology infrastructure. The IT team determined the best course of action was to replace the existing system with a hyperconverged infrastructure that allowed for flexibility within public budget limitations. With introductions made from solution integration partners, Clear IT and TD Synnex Solutions, TCM-SP selected Nutanix to implement their hyperconverged infrastructure solution. Since implementing Nutanix, TCM-SP has benefitted from time savings through speeding up their services, ease of scalability, and excellent end user experience.
| Excellent end user experience | Time savings | Ease of scalability |
|---|---|---|
| Faster response times of all the organization’s technology that benefits both internal employees and the external public. | Reduced data transfer time from 25 minutes to eight minutes and reduced VPN login time from 30 seconds to five seconds. | Seamlessly added a load of six million pages scanned from the legacy system to the application that runs on the hyperconverged infrastructure. |
Before implementing the Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure, it took 25 minutes to transfer data from the Municipal Official Gazette every morning, but today it only takes eight minutes. “In our old virtualization environment, it took us almost 30 seconds to log in from a VPN when working remotely, but since migrating to Nutanix, we are doing the same task in less than five seconds.
Responsible for overseeing a budget of over $15 billion, the São Paulo Court of Auditors (TCM-SP) audits bidding contracts in the municipality of São Paulo, the largest city in Brazil. On a daily basis, the organization imports budget data and bids from the Official Gazette of the City and conducts inspections.
TCM-SP has a robust technology infrastructure system for external consultation by companies, press, and citizens as well as its own internal procedures.
Due to its reliance on a layered data center infrastructure and data domain repository from different manufacturers, the organization was faced with issues of complexity and difficulty of management in their technology infrastructure.
“There arose a great need to simplify the management of the IT environment, so that we had a single point of interface and infrastructure that provided improved performance of the applications, backup, and recovery,” explains Estevan Camargo, TCM-SP's Infrastructure Manager, of the IT challenges TCM-SP was battling.
After much deliberation, Estevan and his IT team decided that the solution to their problems was to change the system entirely and adopt a hyperconverged infrastructure.
“We viewed hyperconverged infrastructure as a promising technology that would not tie us to specific hardware or software and stay in accordance with the limitations of the public budget,” says Estevan.
The TCM-SP IT team began extensive research in 2018 alongside solution integration partners, Clear IT and TD Synnex Solutions, who presented the Nutanix technology including how it worked and how it could be adapted to the current infrastructure by making the most of their legacy software.
TCM-SP was especially interested in the ease of scalability and ransomware protection built into the Nutanix equipment as well as its fair cost in comparison to competitors, which is an important factor given the duty of the organization to responsibly utilize public resources.
With the clear advantages before them, TCM-SP decided to officially partner with Nutanix to implement hyperconverged infrastructure within their organization.
Since implementing Nutanix, TCM-SP employees have experienced a noticeable improvement in access to the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) with a decrease in login time, searches, and process queries.
The ease of use experienced after the Nutanix implementation also benefits the external public who utilizes the TCM-SP website. People and companies access the TCM-SP website to conduct research, register protocols, and make public inquiries about detailed information on the spending and investments of the public administration.
TCM-SP has also enjoyed a reduction in the time to import bids from the Municipal Official Gazette, the first task of the day each day at TCM-SP.
“Before the Nutanix hyperconvergence, it took 25 minutes to transfer data from the Municipal Official Gazette every morning, but today it only takes eight minutes,” details Estevan.
Additionally, when TCM-SP acquired Business Intelligence (BI) in 2021, there was concern with projects being implemented with BI because it demands a lot from servers and TCM-SP has a large database of public agencies (City Hall, Union, etc.). The E-TCM (Electronic Process System) added a load of approximately six million pages scanned from the paper legacy system, which required more processing of the application that runs on Nutanix systems, and it happened seamlessly.
Since implementing Nutanix, the positive changes have also been noticed and appreciated by TCM-SP's developers, especially the fact that the assembly of a machine was reduced from 50 to 20 seconds. In addition to the four Nutanix nodes, TCM-SP also has a storage solution, backup, and 160 virtual machines servers in the hyperconverged infrastructure.
Furthermore, the TCM-SP DevOps department has greatly benefitted from the platform's autonomy and security. "One point that caught our attention from the beginning was a performance improvement in certain scenarios that we did not expect,” reports Estevan. “In our old virtualization environment, it took us almost 30 seconds to log in from a VPN when working remotely, but since migrating to Nutanix, we are doing the same task in less than five seconds. It's an extremely fast response that I've never seen before,” Estevan reports.
"We are proud to be part of a project that will benefit the more than 12 million residents of the city of São Paulo," says Leonel Oliveira, Country Manager of Nutanix in Brazil. "The TCM-SP project shows the public sector's relentless search for transparently improving its IT system as well as investing in the best technologies and people to improve its services. Now, the IT team can further focus on accelerating their strategic plans with the guarantee of availability, agility, and security.”