Estonian Government IT Provider SMIT Standardizes on Nutanix to Simplify Infrastructure Management and Empower Developers with Continuous Deployment
Overview
Delivering essential IT services for Estonia’s police and border control agencies, SMIT is classified as a critical service provider. The agency’s complex, siloed infrastructure was impacting scalability, availability, and performance, and hindering the rapid development of new digital services.
Key Results
| Ease of management |
Open standards |
Reduced TCO |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Two infrastructure specialists can manage the entire server and storage environment—a task that typically requires a team of 15-20 people. |
Nutanix’s support for open standards enables SMIT to build powerful continuous deployment pipelines with GitOps and Terraform. | Standardizing on Nutanix AHV eliminates the significant licensing costs of other proprietary hypervisors. |
I’ve seen organizations that have entire departments devoted to managing their VMs and storage. With Nutanix, we only need two people, not 15 or 20, so we can be very efficient.
Challenge
Siseministeeriumi infotehnoloogia- ja arenduskeskus (SMIT) is the IT and Development Center for the Estonian Ministry of the Interior. As a government agency, SMIT manages more than 100 IT services for other agencies, including the police, border control, rescue, and emergency services, as well as handling citizens’ applications for passports, ID cards, residence cards, and visas.
SMIT’s motto is “Saving Lives with IT”, and this is no exaggeration. Its systems play an active role in helping government employees protect and serve citizens 24/7. On the flip side, any IT availability, performance, or data-related issues that affect frontline services could potentially put people in danger.
In addition, Estonia has earned a reputation around the world as a leader in digital government. Continued innovation requires an IT infrastructure that is flexible, scalable, and easy to automate, so that developers can focus on building new digital services, not managing servers and storage.
To support the next generation of safe, reliable, scalable, and innovative services, SMIT realized that its IT infrastructure needed to evolve. Without a standardized environment, it was difficult to build the automated processes for continuous deployment needed to support modern development practices.
Solution
SMIT recognized that a hyperconverged infrastructure would solve most of the problems with its existing landscape by providing a common platform that would be easier to manage and scale.
After surveying the hyperconverged market, the agency selected Nutanix as the standard for all new services and began moving many of its existing VMware ESXi and KVM services to the Nutanix AHV hypervisor.
Today, approximately 80% of SMIT’s workloads run on Nutanix clusters. The agency expects this proportion to rise significantly as migrations continue and developers launch new services.
Siim Vene, Chief Infrastructure Architect at SMIT, comments: “You could say that in practice, every person living in Estonia or visiting Estonia will be using services running on top of Nutanix.”
Thanks to Nutanix Prism’s one-click infrastructure management, just two system administrators are capable of managing the entire Nutanix estate, which comprises dozens of clusters and thousands of virtual machines. Nutanix capabilities such as live patching also help to keep things simple, because admins don’t have to take systems offline to perform upgrades.
Meanwhile, from a developer’s perspective, infrastructure management is seamless and mostly invisible. Although they can log into Prism if they wish, the goal is for them to interact with the infrastructure mainly through SMIT’s GitOps continuous deployment pipeline, which is built on open-source technologies such as Kubernetes and Terraform.
Customer Outcome
Since standardizing on Nutanix, SMIT has been able to provide its developers and end-users with total availability and seamless service—there have been zero serious incidents with the Nutanix stack, and performance has been almost faultless.
Flexibility and scalability have improved significantly too. SMIT can deploy new Kubernetes clusters of tens of virtual machines in minutes—so when developers start a new project, they can spin up development, test, and production environments quickly and get to work without delay.
Siim Vene comments: “It was very important to us to be able to build our GitOps pipeline on open-source technologies and not be locked into a particular vendor’s tools. With Nutanix, there was no impediment at any step along the way—the platform is really flexible and versatile, so you can use whatever combination of Nutanix’s own offerings and open-source solutions works best for your business.”
He adds: “We’ve had a really good working relationship with Nutanix from the start. Their documentation and tools are first-class, and their team is always there to get us the help we need when we need it.”
Next Steps
SMIT now has the flexible, scalable infrastructure it needs to deliver reliable, high-performance IT support to front-line services throughout Estonia. As migrations to the AHV hypervisor continue, the landscape will become more standardized and even easier to manage and automate over time.
Looking to the future, SMIT’s open standards-based approach to infrastructure management and automation will provide vital flexibility as Estonia’s digital government services continue to evolve.
Siim Vene concludes: “Today, we’re operating our own data center, but in the longer term the government may decide to bring all its infrastructure into a central cloud. If that day comes, we’re in a good position, because Nutanix has enabled us to build an open standards solution that we can port easily to any platform.”