The Central Highlands Regional Council (CHRC) is responsible for managing an area of around 60,000 square kilometres in Central Queensland – home to more than 30,000 people. When CHRC turned to Truis to help upgrade its digitised services, we worked with them from the ground up. Firstly, understanding them, the problem, their current capabilities and where they want to be.
“We wanted to work with Truis again because of the support they had provided in the past.”
The legacy IT infrastructure at CHRC could no longer support the authority’s digitisation goals. Expanding CHRC’s IT infrastructure was virtually impossible because of a current lack of space in the data centre. In addition, CHRC’s small IT team already had its hands full trying to manage the infrastructure as it was. And, disaster recovery (DR) capabilities were at their limits, making failover a concern for an expanded platform. For Clinton Nicol-Dickson, IT manager at CHRC, it was a chance to transform the council’s IT for a multi-cloud era.
“Working with Truis really gave us peace of mind.”
Working closely with Clinton and the team at CHRC, we recommended a Nutanix HCI (hyper-converged infrastructure) with Lenovo. The aim was to create a highly scalable, modernised data centre to move applications between on-premises and different clouds.
We deployed three Nutanix nodes on Lenovo at CHRC’s production site and three at a DR site for replication with Veeam, enabling hourly snapshots and daily backups. CHRC’s key workloads were migrated to Nutanix, including an asset management application, a document management system, and a geographic information system (GIS). In addition, both Microsoft SQL databases, Windows servers, and Skype for Business were also moved to Nutanix. We also included Nutanix Prism and Nutanix Files to streamline IT management and to enable intelligent file storage.
Clinton and the team have many file shares to oversee, from shared drives to collaborative working directories. With this in mind, we ensured it was simple and easy for CHRC to stay in control and updated through a single interface.
“Having Truis and Nutanix allows us to be more agile because we have the support and additional time to deliver a stream of new projects for the organisation.”
“We have a solution that easily interacts with cloud environments, making processes, like migrating a VM [virtual machine] up to the cloud, seamless.”
CHRC is now a more streamlined and secure council thanks to a collaborative effort. The team has cut management workloads by at least 25%, and the flexible infrastructure enables continued transformation towards the council’s multi-cloud strategy.
With Nutanix, CHRC is driving digitisation to improve service delivery. Council personnel have secure remote access to data on multiple devices when working in the region’s communities. The flexibility of Nutanix also enabled CHRC to easily respond to the pandemic and working from home arrangements.
Besides delivering workplace efficiencies for CHRC, the power efficiency of Nutanix compared with the three-tiered infrastructure is much greater. IT costs are now significantly lower, and the data centre footprint has halved – freeing up space for future expansion.
The project was delivered on time, and the CHRC team is delighted with the cost-effective, scalable solution. As we continue to work with Clinton and his team, we are excited to help them provide the best possible service to their community.
“Truis provided us with the technical expertise to migrate our systems to our Nutanix solution without any disruption. We developed a really strong relationship with Truis because they went above-and-beyond the levels of service of other IT solution providers.”
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