Fuji City Deploys Nutanix to Improve Agility of IT Infrastructure and Strengthen DR Measures in One Step

CHALLENGES

Fuji City, Shizuoka Prefecture, is a city that faces the sea and is surrounded by Mt Fuji. With over 250,000 residents (as of April 1, 2021), the city is blessed with good water resources, the city has been known as a “paper city” since the Meiji era (1868-1912) for its concentration of paper manufacturing industries. The city is also a major transportation hub connecting the east and west of Japan, and during the period of rapid economic growth, many chemical and transportation machinery factories were established, making it one of the leading industrial cities in the prefecture.

Currently, under the “Fuji City Digital Transformation Declaration” issued in August 2020, Fuji City is promoting initiatives such as the digitization of administration, the use of ICT in education, the reform of work styles, and the development of digital human resources, with “citizen service,” “regional revitalization,” and “administrative management” as the three pillars of digital transformation.

Fuji City has been a pioneer in transforming its IT infrastructure to support internal operations. The city adopted desktop virtualization technology early on to simplify the operation and management of business terminals, and has adopted thin clients for approximately 2,400 terminals used by employees, and has actively used VDI and SBC (Server Based Computing).

However, virtualization tends to increase the complexity of the server infrastructure and increase the workload for operation and management, resulting in high costs. It was also difficult to speed up the preparation of the server environment necessary to meet the demands of the business.

SOLUTION

Fuji City took the opportunity of updating its VDI environment system to realize an agile IT infrastructure that can respond quickly to requests for server expansion while significantly reducing operational burden. What we wanted was an IaaS environment where we could immediately prepare the necessary IT resources on demand,” said Koji Daicho, Senior Manager, Information Policy Division, General Affairs Department, Fuji City. Nutanix HCI (Hyperconverged Infrastructure) was the obvious choice as a solution to realize this environment on-premise.

The city also formulated a business continuity plan for its ICT department in 2017, and decided to create a highly effective DR (disaster recovery) system along with the conversion of its VDI environment to IaaS. We have a joint computer system with the neighboring Fujinomiya City, and we have set up an IT infrastructure using the housing services of an external data center. Although it was resistant to disasters, there was an inherent risk that if the network connecting the data center and the government building were to be disrupted by a large-scale disaster, all government operations would cease. Therefore, we installed the same IT infrastructure as the data center in the main government office building and built the main government office building as a backup site. Because the building is equipped with seismic isolation capabilities and power generation equipment which allows continuous operations even in times of network disruptions” said Kotaro Kato, chief of the Information Policy Section of the General Affairs Department.

Against this backdrop, the city held a tender for the system upgrade in 2019, resulting in the decision to implement Nutanix Cloud Platform.

CUSTOMER OUTCOMES

The renewal of the IT infrastructure, including DR, went smoothly, and full-scale operations began in January 2020 at the data center and the main government office building. In addition to the VDI environment that supports the work of the agency’s employees, RPA (robotics process automation) platform introduced as part of the agency’s DX (digital transformation) was also integrated into the Nutanix IaaS. Number of servers were significantly reduced and performance in capacity boosted the DR system. Both benefits led to a reduction in data center housing costs.

Daicho said, “The IT infrastructure in the main government building is basically a backup of the infrastructure deployed at the data center. And since we have enough capacity, we use it as secure resources for backup and use them for other purposes as well. As a result, we no longer need to dedicate all of the resources in the main government office building side to be on ‘standby’, and this makes the investment in backup infrastructure more productive.

We are also able to quickly set up the necessary server environment whenever there is a request from each department or section within the agency to introduce a new systems. “If the resources are available, we can prepare the necessary server environment in 5 to 10 minutes, and we can flexibly change the specifications after the server is built. With Nutanix, we can quickly move and synchronize servers between the IT infrastructure in the data center and the IT infrastructure in the main government building, and we can migrate terabytes of data easily.” said Kato.

NEXT STEPS

Fuji City has already completed operational tests of the DR system it has built. It has also carried out tests to confirm business continuity for major government office operations in event of network disruptions between the data center and the main government building.

"In the future, we will ensure that our employee will be able to handle all the system operations necessary for DR without the support of a contractor, so that we can be fully prepared for emergencies. In addition, the IT infrastructure deployed at the data center and the main government building will be optimized according to the use of the system in order to make effective use of the two locations", Daicho said.