Birmingham City Council is planning to migrate much of its IT estate to a hybrid cloud infrastructure.
It has reached an agreement with cloud solutions specialist Nutanix to use its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software with its integrated AHV hypervisor and Prism central management console to support the migration.
The move is aimed at developing a streamlined solution with a single pane of management for the council to take full control of its IT infrastructure, and identify replacement technologies and services as part of its digital transformation.
Phil Degg, Birmingham’s head of busines solutions, said: “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.
“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 also plans to use Nutanix’s Flow product to build and manage a software defined network, and its Flow application and lifecycle management tools to build a service catalogue. In addition, it will use Nutanix Beam to manage the cost and security compliance of workloads across the hybrid cloud estate.
Public cloud consideration
The company said the council had considered public cloud solutions, but decided the hybrid cloud approach would give it scalability along with the security of an on-premise data centre.
Birmingham has made some radical changes in its management of ICT services in recent years, having terminated the Service Birmingham joint venture with Capita in 2017 completed the migration of most services back in-house in August 2019.
