Savon ICT
Savon ICT-palvelut employs 23 professionals and provides services related to workstations, cybersecurity, telecommunications, networks, cloud services, and data centers for both small and large public administration organizations in Savonia.
Nutanix’s hyper-converged solution
The data center environment of Savon ICT-palvelut Oy, which provides ICT services for public administration organizations, has been revamped with Nutanix’s hyper-converged solution. The modern data center offers improved performance and reliability for the company serving municipalities and cities in delivering ICT services.
“As the utilization rate of virtualization increased, our licensing costs became too high. It was time to renew our server and storage solutions as well as our virtualization platform. Our data center’s performance and capacity no longer met our requirements,” says Hannu Tenhunen, Operations Manager at Savon ICT. “We wanted a modern solution that would also bring savings over the next five years.”
NetNordic conducted an assessment and current state analysis, along with development proposals and calculations (TCO, ROI) for Savon ICT for the next five years. Nutanix’s advanced sizing tools were utilized in planning capacity needs. NetNordic’s professionals were involved in design, implementation, project management, and steering group activities.
Close to Customers and Users
According to Tenhunen, Savon ICT, based in Iisalmi, aims to provide cost-effective and high-quality ICT services close to the users of those services.
There are thousands of employees serving our customers, and we want to ensure they have uninterrupted ICT services. Most of our customers no longer want to maintain their own data center solutions and purchase the resources they need from us as a service. We set three key requirements for the modernization of our data center. We wanted an easily manageable and controllable environment. We required good usability and flexible scalability according to our business and customer needs. We also wanted to eliminate multiple different management tools.
According to IDC research*, Nutanix’s hyper-converged data center saves about 60% of working time compared to traditional 3-tier solutions.
“We can now operate our data centers primarily through one management console instead of three, and we can allocate resources for new workloads within minutes. To ensure usability, distributing resources across different data centers is easy, and scalability is also handled flexibly. Managing storage capacity is now significantly more convenient,” says Veli-Pekka Mikkonen, ICT designer at Savon ICT. “Nutanix’s license included everything necessary, such as ‘Near Sync’ clustering. Implementing a redundant environment is cost-effective.”
Savon ICT’s data centers also produce numerous critical services for customers, such as telecommunications, access control, email, and healthcare services.
“We also save on the ease of management.”
Hannu Tenhunen, Savon ICT-palvelut
– Hannu Tenhunen, Savon ICT-palvelut
Speed and Usability Elevated to a New Level
Savon ICT’s redundant data center environment hosts a significant amount of server capacity for customers, nearly all of which is virtualized. Nutanix’s management tools utilize artificial intelligence to anticipate capacity needs.
“Since the modernization, we haven’t received any reports about the slowness of certain applications or poor usability,” says Mikkonen. “If our customers need a new information system, we can quickly provide the necessary data center resources. When a customer acquires a new information system, we can bring a virtual server into production within a few hours, whereas it could previously take a month for a physical server. Our customers have praised the speed of our services.”
“Nutanix’s resources and performance have been more than sufficient for our needs; the sizing has been successful, and we haven’t had to purchase additional capacity so far. Processor loads are mostly between 25-40 percent, peaking at around 65-70 percent during backups or maintenance,” says Mikkonen. “We have also not faced performance issues regarding storage due to the partial all-flash implementation. We are satisfied with the quality and reliability of backups as well. The modernization of our data center infrastructure has met our expectations regarding backups as well,” says Tenhunen.
Better Capabilities for Customer Service
NetNordic is a Nutanix Master Partner and supports Savon ICT with contract-based continuous services. “We gain insights into the functionality and health of our data center environment. We know what is happening in our environment and can use our resources more cost-effectively. NetNordic’s experts ensure the availability and quality of our ICT services. We can proactively anticipate potential needs for increased computing power, memory, or storage capacity. Optimizing data center resources is now handled efficiently,” says Tenhunen.
“We have always received quick help or advice when needed,” says Mikkonen.
Digitalization and automation are increasingly prominent in public administration as well. “We now have better capabilities to offer our customers services that comprehensively support the development of their operations,” says Tenhunen. “It’s also good that Nutanix can be easily integrated with public cloud services if needed.”
NetNordic implemented for Savon ICT:
- Nutanix’s hyper-converged data center architecture and data replication to a separate data center space.
- Proactive and reactive continuous support services.
- Comprehensive health management of the ICT environment.
- Efficiency and savings through ease of management.
Key Features of NetNordic’s Modern Backup Solution:
- Seamlessly integrates with Nutanix’s hyper-converged technology.
- Rapidly evolving solution that includes AI-based tools and features.
- Includes ready integrations with public cloud services and can also back up public cloud data.
- Inactive data can be transferred to the public cloud cost-effectively.
- Effectively combats malware using AI.
- Efficiently performs real-time database backups.
- Reduces the need for backup expertise, simplifies work, and increases the level of automation.
- Provides assurance for recoveries.
IDC 2017 White paper: “Nutanix Delivering Strong Value as a Cost-Effective, Efficient, Scalable Platform for Enterprise Applications”