Yuri Topolnicki still sometimes gets a shiver when he walks into the Pennsylvania State Capitol. As senior network administrator for the House of Representatives Democratic Caucus, Topolnicki is serving a body that dates back to the very beginnings of American democracy. But while the institution’s marble corridors speak to its centuries of history, its operations run on thoroughly modern technology.
“You still get that chill that goes up your spine when you think about the rich history here,” said Topolnicki.
“But 200-plus years ago, they never envisioned the things that technology would make possible within the walls of this building.”
Today, the Pennsylvania Democratic Caucus, delivers digital services to its 700 employees using data centers powered by Nutanix hyperconverged (HCI) infrastructure technologies. In recent years, what began as a single 10-node HCI cluster has evolved into a robust hybrid cloud IT system spanning four clusters spread across two data centers, with capabilities that extend into the public cloud. During this time, the IT team has helped support a up to 15% growth in organizational size by continuously modernizing infrastructure to meet expanding needs.
When the November 2024 Election came around, Kevin Astree, network and systems manager for the Caucus, braced for an unknown amount of additional workload due to not knowing with certainty the number of incoming freshmen members and outgoing retiring members.
“The mission of providing stable and performant technology services is always critical, however, during this time period specifically, constituents throughout the commonwealth are looking to their government officials for access to critical state and federal resources and information,” Astree told The Forecast.
For some of the constituents it was the first time they interacted with their legislators, so they needed all the support they could get to make a good first impression.
“The Nutanix platform provides our team with the ability to dynamically respond to bursts in demand while delivering the necessary visibility and redundancy to ensure continuous availability of systems that our Members and Legislative Staff depend on to serve our communities,” Astree said.
The capabilities and reliability of the Nutanix platform makes the technology “invisible” to end users, freeing up IT staff to concentrate on work that improves the lives of Keystone State residents, according to Astree.
“We don’t view ourselves as support technicians or network engineers,” Astree said. “We’re constituent servants. When you’re putting out fires, you don’t have an opportunity to innovate and empower members and their staff to deliver that constituent service. The Nutanix ecosystem has allowed us to focus on the things that really matter.”
Scalable, Reliable, Flexible
Two of the Caucus’s clusters are running the Nutanix AHV hypervisor, with the other two running VMware by Broadcom’s ESXi hypervisor.
“We have everything from Active Directory and its dependent services to FTP servers on the infrastructure,” said Topolnicki. “Our website runs off of Nutanix-powered virtual machines, and we have multiple SQL clusters that are running virtualized on Nutanix.”
Topolnicki and Astree said they appreciate the Nutanix environment’s ability to grow with their organization, the reliability of the infrastructure, and the willingness of Nutanix engineers to go above and beyond to help them solve problems.
“Nutanix has been fantastic to work with,” said Astree. “They’ve owned issues – even if there’s a problem that’s caused by another vendor’s technology. They don’t try to pass the buck. It’s been incredible.”
“It’s something we know we can always rely on,” Topolnicki said. “Even in our worst-case instances, we’ve never been down for more than a few minutes. We’ve always felt, this is going to be running in just a moment and sure enough, it always has.”
That sort of stability, according to Topolnicki, makes Nutanix infrastructure extraordinarily flexible, giving IT professionals confidence that they have a solid foundation on top of which to build practically anything.
“We’ve been able to solve so many problems, including high-end designs for virtualized server architecture, with the Nutanix platform,” Topolnicki said.
“We don’t have to worry about whether something is going to break because we’re trying to do too much under the hood. That flexibility is key.”
Astree noted that Nutanix’s Prism dashboard has simplified resource and capacity planning, especially compared to previous “disjointed” solutions from different vendors. Among other improvements, their Nutanix investment has made it possible to migrate and standardize all file servers, and also replace the organization’s storage area network (SAN).
“Every workload that we’ve moved to Nutanix has been somehow supercharged,” Astree said.
Looking Ahead
Astree and Topolnicki anticipate that the Caucus will continue to expand its Nutanix environment, with more of the organization’s IT footprint moving to the cloud in the future.
“To be able to manage and administer everything from a single pane of glass, that gives us the confidence that we can change and expand our environment,” Topolnicki said.
Both are also looking forward to expanded artificial intelligence capabilities in the future, with AI moving beyond the buzz to provide real-time insights that help them better manage their IT environment.
“That’s going to be a big differentiator,” Astree said. “People will choose one platform over another if AI is helping them achieve their outcomes faster.”
Ultimately, Astree and Topolnicki hope these improvements will result in better constituent services.
“That gives us a sense of pride, when we’re doing our duties, to know that we’re making good things happen,” Topolnicki said.
“We’re connecting people with resources, and we’re connecting people with their legislators. All these things are really positive. I’ve never felt as rewarded before in any other job. You really get the sense that you’re doing something important.”
With new members set to be sworn into the Pennsylvania House in January, after the 2024 elections, Astree and Topolnicki will be busy connecting freshman representatives and their staffers to the digital resources they need to keep the work of the Commonwealth going.
“There are a lot of demands on the IT department to get things up and running right away, because of course these members want to be able to serve their constituents as soon as humanly possible,” Astree said.
“There is always this ramping up and excitement during the election season,” said Topolnicki. “We get to catch our breath for just a little bit, and then we start ramping up all over again.”
He said the ability to allocate resources to a hyperconverged platform allows his team to provide everything from simple business services all the way up to provisioned computing resources for critical needs.
“This allows us to plan for future growth in the most fiscally responsible way for the organization,” Topolnicki said. “When the organization does its mission well, the legislators have less need to worry about the availability of their tools to service constituent needs and more time to actually service those constituents, even in such a dynamic time as an election cycle in a nationally watched spotlight."
Calvin Hennick is a contributing writer. His work appears in BizTech, Engineering Inc., The Boston Globe Magazine and elsewhere. He is also the author of Once More to the Rodeo: A Memoir. Follow him @CalvinHennick.
Ken Kaplan contributed to this story.
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