Birmingham City Council to implement hybrid cloud

Birmingham City Council’s Information, Technology and Digital Service (IT&D) will migrate its legacy hardware to a hybrid cloud infrastructure as part of the next phase of its ICT and Digital Strategy.

“As the largest city in the UK outside the capital, with a population of over 1.1 million, we needed a highly scalable solution, able to support approximately 450 applications, 11,500 council employees, 12,500 devices, and 1.3 petabytes of data,” said Phil Degg, Head of Business Solutions IT&D at Birmingham City Council. “Several vendors met the requirement but Nutanix stood out as providing the best value, with its native AHV hypervisor, and flexibility to choose the right tools while still managing everything centrally.”

 

The Council will use Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software with its integrated AHV hypervisor and central management console, Prism. It will also leverage other cloud products including Nutanix Beam, Calm and Flow.

Birmingham considered a pure public cloud solutions, but ultimately decided to focus on a true hybrid cloud approach using both public cloud and an on premise solution based on an HCI-powered software platform that can deliver cloud-like scalability from a secure on-premises datacenter.

Birmingham will be able to take full control of its IT infrastructure with a complete, end-to-end solution providing a single pane of management. This will allow them to develop and refine their digital plans as well as identify replacement technologies and services to continue the transformation process.

Another key factor in selecting Nutanix was the completeness of the solution, including the ability to split the council infrastructure across multiple data centres, as well as native replication and disaster recovery tools to deliver continuity of service.

To support the digital strategy, Birmingham City Council purchased 74 nodes, deployed across two sites, providing a highly secure, resilient and scalable solution.

“Ambitious initiatives as radical and sizeable as this are rare in UK local government, and we’re both humbled and proud to have been chosen for such a key role,” said Dom Poloniecki, General Manager, Sales, Western Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa region at Nutanix. “More than that, the ambitions at Birmingham City Council align very well with our strategy to help customers leverage our market leading private cloud platform and extend it seamlessly into a hybrid Cloud environment while automating business processes. We are very excited to partner with the Council on this ambitious and exciting program with Birmingham and we will support them in their journey.”

Additionally, the Council will be using the microsegmentation, application visualisation and network automation tools of Nutanix Flow to build and manage its software-defined network. It also plans to leverage application automation and lifecycle management tools in Nutanix Calm to build a service catalogue integrated with ServiceNow, as well as Nutanix Beam to manage the cost and security compliance of workloads across its hybrid cloud estate.