N.C. City Cuts Costs and Improves Data Center Performance by Switching to Hyperconverged Platform

Fans of "Parks and Recreation" know that Leslie Knope is all about helping her city save tax payers' money. Although sitcoms are very different from the real world, one North Carolina city proved that helping your city save money AND improve IT infrastructure can actually become a reality!

Challenge:

The SQL server environment a North Carolina city needed to support its 44,000 residents was running out of storage space. With only one Lenovo server hosting all 16 of the city’s databases, the customer’s environment could no longer support the execution of simple tasks such as tracking daily usage and activity.

Even worse, with more than 450 end users relying on the website to service the public, the city would be paralyzed if the server ever went down. The IT staff knew it was time for a new solution. Having worked with SHI for close to four years, this Tar Heel city turned to our storage experts for help.

Solution:

Originally, the city was considering a traditional storage approach: namely buying additional Lenovo servers to separate the SQL server into several database servers to support their data. However, the customer was open to exploring an alternative hyperconverged solution as well.

SHI's storage experts scoped the city’s environment, analyzing network performance and storage metrics to properly right-size a solution. Since the customer had a solid relationship with Lenovo, an SHI field solutions engineer recommended a Lenovo/Nutanix hyperconverged appliance.

The hyperconverged option would give the city the high availability they needed for much less than what they would have spent on adding new servers.

With the right teams and proper resources, SHI helped the customer:

• Plan the project
• Architect the setup
• Configure and test the build
• Deploy the solution and migrate existing data

After finalizing the architecture of the solution, the city purchased three nodes of the Lenovo ConvergedHX3310 Nutanix Appliances – increasing their amount of available storage by 12 TB and saving more than $50K in the process!

Deployed within six weeks' time, the new solution integrated seamlessly with the city's Hyper-V environment and continues to save operational time for the small IT staff through ease-of-use and management.