Surrey County Council, one of the largest local government bodies in the United Kingdom, say’s it has chosen Nutanix, the web-scale converged infrastructure company, for the migration of its existing data center infrastructures to a new shared services cloud hosting platform. The new platform will allow Surrey County Council to offer connectivity, cloud, virtualization and application hosting services to not only its own organisation, but also to other local government and healthcare organisations across the region. The project supports the Council’s long-term financial strategy to save at least £200m over the next five years, helping it to become more operationally efficient by dramatically reducing IT operating costs, freeing up resources locally and contributing towards its environmental targets centered on carbon footprint reduction.

The new Web-scale, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform, housed in a 170-rack data center, will offer each of Surrey’s regional borough and district councils a centrally-managed and serviced infrastructure and computing environment, enabling them to move away from having to own and support their own separate dedicated infrastructures, data centers and computing environments. Its introduction will also allow them to exploit the benefits of virtualization and hyper-convergence technologies across the new cloud-based infrastructure, with the ultimate goal of consolidating and standardizing to a common platform and application set across all of the councils.

Introduced to the benefits of Nutanix’s technology through its local integration partner, Virtuoso, Surrey County Council chose Nutanix because of its unique scale-out proposition: the ‘invest as you grow’ approach and simplified cost structure for turn-up of service is an attractive proposition for local government bodies looking to reduce upfront capital expenditure in today’s economic climate. Other key factors in Surrey County Council’s choice were the ease of management and deployment – the entire platform was ready for service within four months of the project start – as well as Nutanix’s ability to support flexible, multi-hypervisor environments.

Paul Brocklehurst, CIO of Surrey County Council, commented on the new implementation: “Nutanix and Virtuoso will enable the council to deliver cost effective, scalable and robust IT services to our local partners, ultimately helping us deliver on our long-term strategy to rationalize and consolidate local government services across the region, saving costs and delivering a better experience to our residents.” 

Paul Phillips, Regional Director for Nutanix, added: ‘By choosing Nutanix, Surrey County Council has elected to take a pathfinder approach to scaling and optimizing their IT requirements, allowing it to deliver a simplified, highly cost-efficient and infinitely scalable approach to servicing their growing client user base. This is a model that is easily replicated across local authorities and healthcare providers everywhere, helping them to scale and manage their infrastructure whilst still contributing significantly to the economic and environmental targets placed upon them’.