An interview with James Rowe, Technology Architect at Palmerston North City Council
New Zealand’s second largest university implements Nutanix
New Zealand’s Palmerston North City Council (PNCC) were an early adopter of Nutanix, Rubrik and Azure technology. By implementing those three technologies, the team has the quintessential experience when it comes to simplicity, ease of management, predictable scalability and delivery on business objectives. The synergy of these technologies provide an enterprise datacenter that uses visionary technology to provide agility not seen before with traditional hardware and software vendors.
What challenges in your business influenced you to look for a solution?
Rowe: “PNCC provides a wide range of services that people rely on every day, we manage and maintain the city’s infrastructure. Our vision is to be recognized as sustainable but above all, innovative. Our IT team plays an important role in this. Almost two years ago we were looking to replace a SAN. At the Local Government Conference we came across BEarena and Nutanix. We looked into the technology and got very enthusiastic. Instead of just replacing our SAN, we decided to replace our entire virtual infrastructure. That was the first of the three technologies we’ve implemented.”
Rowe continues: “ Last year when I went to the Nutanix .NEXT conference, we experienced a challenge with Virtual Machine Backups interrupting service. We run the call centre for 27 councils in New Zealand and were looking for a solution because the backup solution that we used at that time wasn’t working. Rubrik attended .NEXT as an exhibitor and we got to talk. It became clear quite quickly that we wanted to bring in their technology to solve our issue.”
What were key considerations in the decision making process to opt for each piece of technology?
Rowe: “When we started looking at Nutanix our long term strategy was essential: a hybrid cloud approach. Nutanix was (and is) the perfect solution. In regards to considering Rubrik we mostly debated on the costs. Compared to what we used at that time, implementing this technology was quite the investment so obviously we did some due diligence. In the end, the major benefits of Rubrik outweighed the costs.
Row continues: “Choosing who would help us with the implementation was a no-brainer. We have a good relationship with BEarena, one that we have had since we started with the Nutanix implementation.”
Did you encounter any challenges implementing the solution?
Rowe: “There’s one obstacle that we came across during the implementation of both the technologies; we hit space limits that we created ourselves. When we started the process we estimated how much we would grow, but really didn’t have the slightest idea of how much exactly. We knew we could expand with Nutanix and add capacity if we needed to, because it’s basically a big pool of storage. We virtualized 60 physical servers in addition to the 60 virtual servers we’d migrated to Nutanix but we hit space limits because we approached it as a traditional SAN solution with traditional SAN limitations.”
