Cochise County Virtualizes with Web-Scale IT and Hyper-V

Cochise County is located in the U.S. state of Arizona. It has a population of about 132,000 and spans more than 4 million acres. It includes the historic city of Tombstone and is often referred to as the “Land of Legends”. The county government provides many different public and safety services such as; law enforcement, courts, social welfare, housing, highway maintenance, schools and libraries. The county's IT department, led by Tyson Mock, is responsible for maintaining the technological infrastructure that supports these services. The department faced the challenge of modernizing its aging server infrastructure to ensure the continued delivery of critical applications and services to the county's residents and employees.

At the time Tyson Mock joined Cochise County as IT Director, his team faced the challenge of developing a plan to replace approximately 50 aging physical servers, many of which were more than 10 years old. The servers hosted all of the county’s critical applications. Replacing them with new physical servers wasn’t even a consideration. “I knew we needed to capitalize on virtualization. We wanted to deploy, cost-effectively, a new virtualized environment that would let us retire the old physical servers and move those critical applications into a stable, high performing, and easy to administer environment,” said Mock. Past experience with high cost and difficult to manage Fibre Channel SANs as well as mediocre performing iSCSI SANs lead Mock to pursue an alternative way to virtualize his environment. Mock decided to start with a clean slate. “I was looking specifically for non-traditional virtualization options that would lower costs, simplify management and not sacrifice performance or stability,” he said.

Mock discovered the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform on the web while researching different options for their next generation infrastructure. He was intrigued by the patented Nutanix Distributed File System (NDFS) that combines compute and storage into a single distributed system and supports linear scalability. The Virtual Computing Platform’s ability to start small and expand simply by adding nodes along with built-in resiliency also appealed to Mock. The use of local SSDs and automated data tiering for optimized performance also fit their needs for high performance. “I was interested in high performance, especially because we wanted to virtualize SQL Server,” said Mock. “NDFS leveraging SSDs would give us more horsepower to make sure performance is what we need it to be.” The team also evaluated another converged solution from a different vendor. However, the features were not as advanced as Nutanix nor did it deliver the simplicity they needed. Traditional servers and SAN were written off because the overall cost and complexity was just too high. They considered purchasing several large multi-core servers from a brand-name vendor to virtualize their environment. However, this model lacks redundancy and cannot easily expand compute and storage. “There was no redundancy built into the system, no ability to really leverage deduplication within the environment and it would not have been easy to scale. Adding more horsepower and more storage would have been very difficult too.” In the end, the advantages of web-scale infrastructure, high availability and high performance won the day. “The GUI management interface and simplicity of managing the architecture was a key factor in our consideration as well. Given that we have limited staff on the team, we wanted something that we could build out with very little ongoing engineering and support. If we have any issues or engineering needs, Nutanix support will be there for us,” Mock added.

• The deployment of Nutanix NX-3000 Series systems with Hyper-V has significantly improved the performance of Cochise County's IT infrastructure. Applications such as Microsoft SQL Server and System Center Configuration Manager are running more efficiently, providing faster service to county employees and the public.
• The virtualization project has allowed Cochise County to reduce its datacenter footprint from six racks to just one, streamlining operations and reducing the physical space required for IT infrastructure.
• The new system is easy to configure and maintain, requiring minimal ongoing engineering and support, which is crucial given the limited staff available in the county's IT department.
• The implementation of the Nutanix platform has enhanced the stability and redundancy of the county's IT environment, ensuring that critical applications remain available and reliable.
• The project has set the stage for future scalability, allowing the county to easily expand its compute and storage capabilities as needed without significant additional costs or complexity.

• 6:1 reduction in datacenter rack space.
• 80% reduction in power and cooling expenses.