Ohio Army National Guard Enhances IT Infrastructure with Nutanix Converged Platform
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform
- NX-3000
Tech Stack
- PCIe Flash Storage
- SSD Flash Storage
- VMware Horizon View
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Energy Saving
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Applicable Industries
- National Security & Defense
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Remote Asset Management
- Virtual Prototyping & Product Testing
Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
The Ohio Army National Guard, headquartered at Beightler Armory in Columbus, Ohio, is a component of the Ohio National Guard and the Army National Guard of the US Army. It includes a variety of combat, combat support, and combat service support units, with a total of approximately 11,400 soldiers. The Guard's IT department is responsible for providing systems to support operations and troop mobilization. As part of the organized militia of the state of Ohio, the Ohio Army National Guard also includes the Ohio Naval Militia, the Ohio Military Reserve, and the Ohio Air National Guard. The Guard's mission is to provide trained and equipped units for prompt mobilization in case of war, national emergency, or as otherwise directed by state or federal authorities.
The Challenge
The Ohio Army National Guard faced the challenge of outdated server and storage hardware that had reached the end of its 5-year warranty. The existing infrastructure, consisting of first-generation HP blade servers and iSCSI and Fibre Channel SANs, was no longer adequate for the current application workloads. The Guard needed a new infrastructure that could support existing applications and a new Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) initiative. The IT department aimed to transition to virtual desktops to streamline desktop support, patching, and provisioning, thereby reducing administrative overhead. They evaluated new HP servers and SAN storage, Cisco UCS servers with a SAN, and the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform. The decision to choose Nutanix was driven by its simplicity, converged architecture, high performance, power efficiency, and convenient VM-centric replication.
The Solution
The Ohio Army National Guard selected the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform (NX-3000) to address their infrastructure needs. Nutanix offered a SAN-free, converged solution that provided a single point of management for server and storage resources, simplifying the management process. The integration of PCIe and SSD flash storage in the Nutanix system enabled exceptionally low latency and high IOPS, essential for a good user desktop experience with VDI. Remote replication was a key feature, with Nutanix offering one-to-many replication for individual VMs, simplifying setup and recovery for the IT staff. The Nutanix system was fast and easy to set up, taking less than 2 hours to be operational after network configuration. Migration to the Nutanix system is underway, with Microsoft SQL Server, System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), and a 20-user pilot project for VMware Horizon View currently running on Nutanix. Plans are in place to add SharePoint and expand to 100 user desktops by the end of 2013.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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