Palmerston North Minimises Outage Risk

Palmerston North Minimises Outage Risk and Targets Hybrid Cloud Strategy with Nutanix

New Zealand Council Revives IT Environment to Improve Reliability and Performance of Digital Services Used by 90,000 Citizens

Nutanix, a leader in enterprise cloud computing, today announced at its annual .NEXT on Tour conference in Melbourne it has helped Palmerston North City Council reduce its outage risk, begin a hybrid cloud strategy and improve the digital services it provides to its 90,000 citizens.

Located in the Manawatu-Whanganui Region of the North Island of New Zealand, Palmerston North, or ‘Palmy’ as it’s referred to by locals, is considered to be a business innovation hub. Previously, the Council suffered one or two system outages per month due to a variety of factors including weather emergencies and legacy infrastructure. This left its citizens unable to use many of the digital services they’ve grown to rely on, including utilities, dog registration and online bill and fee payments.

Since the deployment of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, assisted by trusted IT partner BEarena, these issues are a thing of the past. The move has also enabled disaster recovery, providing added security in important areas such as financial applications. Nutanix also supports almost all systems and applications, including SQL, Microsoft Exchange and Ozone, a local government-specific suite of business-critical apps used by City Councils throughout New Zealand.

“More and more of our citizens rely on digital services as part of their daily lives, so we needed to make sure they were always available,” said James Rowe, Technology Architect at Palmerston North City Council. “Nutanix has provided a reliable platform on which we can run these services while also increasing IT performance and allowing us to focus on improving services to citizens.”

Palmerston North has also begun using the public cloud for certain applications such as long-term archiving and field apps. Ultimately, the Council is targeting a hybrid strategy and feels Nutanix is best-positioned to help it achieve that. At its .NEXT conference in June, the enterprise cloud company announced Nutanix Calm and Xi Cloud Services, which will help customers like Palmerston North use public cloud services within their on-premises environment.

“Uptake of public cloud services in NZ has been slow compared with many other regions,” added Rowe. “It’s catching up now, and we see it as an important part of our long-term strategy. But many of our services will always need to remain under our roof, so a hybrid approach is essential and Nutanix will be a partner in getting that balance right.”

The combination of reduced outages, better performance and a simpler user interface, achieved with Nutanix, has enabled Palmerston North’s 15-strong IT team to focus on delivering better outcomes for its departments and developing new digital services for the community.

Nutanix has also enabled Palmerston North to reduce IT power consumption by 80 per cent and decrease the physical footprint of its datacentre by the same margin. The Council expects further savings when it adopts the Nutanix AHV hypervisor at a later date.

“Despite having limited resources, Councils are expected to deliver reliable and high-quality digital services to a large population,” said Matt Young, Senior Vice President and Head of Asia Pacific and Japan, Nutanix. “This burden increases as citizens become more dependent on these services for their daily lives. By implementing an enterprise cloud strategy, Palmerston North is modernising its approach and will be able to meet its citizens’ demands as they evolve.”

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