FOR REVIEW
Derby City Council discovered the downsides of a hasty move to the cloud, then shifted to a hybrid model with a Nutanix partner
‘Cloud first’ is a viable concept but a rush to the cloud can create more problems than it solves if not approached with care.
It’s a lesson that has been learned through painful experience at Derby City Council, ultimately prompting a repatriation of applications and a move to a hybrid model for the foreseeable future.
Mark Walker, the council’s head of ICT (pictured below), says that their experience demonstrates the need to fully understand workloads and systems and how they could be affected by a migration, especially to a public cloud.
“Cloud first is the aspirational environment to which a lot of organisations want to move,” he says. “But within that you have to consider what you are trying to achieve and fitting that to cloud. If it doesn’t fit within cloud, then you shouldn’t be making that choice in my view.”
Derby began its migration to a public cloud when a contract for managed IT services and its data centre were due to expire in 2015. It had high expectations, but midway through the change it became clear that key legacy applications that had been designed to run in-house would consume more resources in the cloud at a higher cost than anticipated.
“What happened was a lot of legacy applications were not performing as we expected,” says Walker. “Fundamentally we had to reassess the machine types and move up the scale. That also included moving up the cost scale.
“Pretty much every platform that was migrated needed an increase in performance, with increases in CPU, disc space, memory, and that effectively blew the calculations.”
Further problems
The problems were intensified when the operator of the on-premise data centre raised its prices, and the council had to look to replace legacy hardware that it had expected to make redundant through the migration.
It had to take drastic action in response, taking applications back in-house in a relocated data centre under new management. It also began to plan for a hyperconverged infrastructure – in which all the elements are defined by software rather than hardware and run on virtual machines – to deliver the scalability and pay-for-use costings that it expected from the cloud, but in a format better suited to its workload mix.
“We started to look in the marketplace at how we could replace the tin with the latest technology,” says Walker. “Nutanix took the concept of the miniaturisation of the point of conversion and infrastructure environment that helped us to migrate to the new data centre but reduce the capacity.”
Derby opted to work on the migration with CDW, a Nutanix Elite partner, that had experience of such projects, and was able to repatriate almost all of its workloads leaving just three in the cloud, notably Office 365. It also moved to the Ark data centre in Bristol, effectively setting up a private cloud with the hyper-convergence capability, rationalising the number of applications from around 500 to below 200, and reducing the number of server racks needed from 27 to four.
This produced considerable savings, with the annual running costs for data centre space down from £200,000 to less than £37,500 and a projection of a £1.7 million saving on total IT spending over the next five years.
Performance boost
“There was a performance boost,” says Walker. “The technology and complexity, and the fact that everything was in one geographical location reduced a lot of the complexity and latency. We’ve had people quoting it’s about a 25% improvement in performance from the migration back.
“We are also rebalancing our people. Fewer are working on the management of the technology and the others are able to innovate in the organisation. We’ve shifted the emphasis from feeding and watering to developing the business and improving our efficiency and effectiveness.”
He says that for the short to medium term the council will continue to use the hybrid model in its existing form, and that while it is likely to retain some functions in a private cloud – due largely to data residency issues – it is looking to take some of its workload back to the public cloud over time. But it will approach the move with more caution than it showed first time around.
“The public cloud is our future destination. We need to understand how the services are delivered, the best fit for where they can be delivered from - and if it fits we will migrate."
Hybrid appeal
Walker’s words are echoed by Andrew Puddephatt, head of public sector at Nutanix.
“Cloud is not a location, and it doesn’t matter where it is,” he says. “It’s an operating model for delivering services and applications, so whether that is on premises or with a public cloud provider should not matter. That’s why hybrid cloud is the model the UK public sector is looking at right now.”
Derby City and Nutanix have compiled a case study outlining the council's journey to public cloud and subsequent repatriation - click start to fill in the form below to download and read their story:
You can also listen to Mark Walker talk about this experience in the video below:
