City of Kemi
Kemi is the centre of trade and services in part of southern Lapland known as “Sea Lapland” in Finland. It houses the paper mills of Stora Enso and Metsä-Botnia, as well as the Outokumpu Kemi mine. Digipolis Kemi Technology Park offers top-flight event and meeting expertise for the industrial sector.
NetNordic’s experts have known our environment for years
The data center of the City of Kemi was updated with Nutanix’s hyper-converged data center solution.
The new data center solution provides fault tolerance and performance for delivering critical information systems and IT services. This easily manageable and cost-effective solution has freed up the busy IT department’s time for more productive development work.
“Our data center previously contained servers and storage devices from different manufacturers. We wanted to renew our environment and improve scalability, performance, manageability, and cost-effectiveness. Among integrated data center solutions, Nutanix’s solution proved to be the best,”
says Reijo Konu, IT Director of the City of Kemi.
“NetNordic’s experts have known our environment for years, and we designed a suitable solution together.”
The City of Kemi did not need to acquire a separate storage network, and Nutanix provides the Acropolis virtualization platform free of charge. “It has proven to be a good platform,” says Konu. “The management of the data center is handled with one tool, and it is significantly easier than before. Our IT experts’ time has been freed from maintenance to more productive development work.”
Fault-tolerant data center architecture
The IT department of the City of Kemi independently manages the maintenance of the data center and controls the SAN network, computing power, and storage. Capacity can be increased while the system is running, and the interface provides transparency regarding the utilization of data center resources. The IT unit can also flexibly utilize fast SSD drives.
“We can quickly gain more storage and computing power. Fault tolerance has been taken to a very high level, and our data center is ‘triple-redundant’ for every component. Critical information systems must operate 24/7. Data center services and the network are closely related to the core functions of healthcare in the City of Kemi and neighboring municipalities.”
The data center hosts part of the patient information system, other electronic information systems, as well as camera and property monitoring systems. Kemi’s IT department collaborates closely with the West-Pohja Hospital District, which serves approximately 64,000 people. The data center in Kemi produces the entire material management information system for the hospital district.
The transition went smoothly
The renewal of the environment, meaning the transition from old data center equipment and about 60 servers to the new one, was completed in two days, including data transfers as a turnkey service. “We wanted to ensure a fast and as seamless transition as possible to the new environment. Interruptions to large information systems were made overnight. I have never seen such a well-executed transition to new data center technology.”
“There is no full certainty in advance about the usability of different information systems with the new technology. Performance has been at a good level, and we have not noticed any bottlenecks,” emphasizes Konu. “The current environment is more cost-effective than before, and we can focus better on renewing and developing systems that are important to users. The manageability of the environment is significantly easier.”
IT supports the region’s economic strategy
The government’s extensive reforms, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, and Kaidi’s plans to build a bio-refinery worth about 900 million euros in Kemi could significantly impact the city’s IT.
“Our IT unit supports the economic strategy of the City of Kemi and neighboring municipalities. We can quickly implement efficient fiber connections if large investments are made in the area. For example, we built wireless network connections to Kemi’s SnowCastle. We have also prepared well in advance for the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, and the renewed data center environment has benefited us in this regard as well. The data security of the data center and network is of high quality.”
The IT experts of the City of Kemi have also participated in NetNordic training. “NetNordic’s experts have the experience and capability to focus on the issues that are important to us. Their promises were also kept regarding the transition phase.”
NetNordic implemented for the City of Kemi
The design, testing, and deployment of Nutanix’s scalable and fault-tolerant hyper-converged data center solution (servers, storage solutions, data center networks, virtualization platform).
Support services and IT consulting as needed until 2022.
“I have never seen such a well-executed transition to new data center technology.”