PA House Democrats optimize operational efficiency with Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure
The Democratic Caucus of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives is a legislative group composed of the Democratic members elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. The caucus represents the interests and concerns of their constituents throughout the state, advocating for policies and legislation aligned with Democratic values and priorities.
With approximately 700 employees, including around 70 in the IT department, they focus on crafting and supporting laws that benefit Pennsylvania's residents, addressing issues such as education, healthcare, economic development, and public safety. The caucus utilizes technology and innovative solutions to effectively communicate with constituents, manage legislative processes, and provide responsive and efficient public service.
Seamless flexibility
The platform allows them to design and use the infrastructure according to their needs.
Capacity for scalability
Nutanix’s Cloud Infrastructure enables easy scaling of resources and addresses issues proactively without major investments.
Enhanced stability
Reliability has reduced the need for constant maintenance, allowing the team to focus on strategic tasks.
Renewal efficiency
Opportunity costs allowed for focused investments in the ecosystem to reduce the need for additional spending, providing long-term cost savings.
It's not just the ecosystem that Nutanix brings to the table. It's the partnership that we've experienced with every one of the representatives that we've had, from the account managers to the solutions engineers. It's been absolutely fantastic.
The Pennsylvania House of Representatives Democrats serve the state’s over 12 million residents, relying heavily on technology to fulfill this mission. Each of the 102 state representatives in the caucus represents about 60,000 citizens, using an advanced software application to engage with and respond to their constituents' needs. “Our network infrastructure hosts the software system that we have developed in-house to aid district offices and staff, relay the needs and wants of constituents, and assist them with services like vehicle registration, voter issues, and community issues,” said Yuri Topolnicki, Senior Network Administrator at Pennsylvania House of Representatives Democratic Caucus. “This constituent service tracking software is the core of what makes our legislative functions operate.”
“The Pennsylvania House of Representatives Democrats support everything from public-facing websites to internal applications that enable representatives and their staff to maximize their interactions with constituents. While these are core competencies for our team, a lot goes into the infrastructure supporting this specific effort,” stated Astree.
Without a reliable platform, accessibility across all internal and external systems would disrupt services, preventing them from maintaining continuous operation. “Uninterrupted access to government services is critical, especially during a crisis,” noted Astree.
To address these challenges, The House of Representatives Democratic Caucus chose to standardize its operations on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform. This decision was driven by the need for a scalable, reliable, and flexible infrastructure that could support their growing organization and new services.
The solution adopted by the Pennsylvania House of Representatives Democratic Caucus includes the Nutanix Cloud Platform, utilizing AHV and ESXi hypervisors, along with Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS), File Analytics, and Micro-segmentation/Flow Network Security for enhanced security and management. This robust setup supports various applications and workloads, including Active Directory, FTP servers, web servers, virtual machines for the Pennsylvania House website, and SQL workloads and clusters running in a virtualized environment.
The implementation of Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure was swift and effective, with the team migrating their VMware ESXi workloads and approximately 100 Microsoft Hyper-V VMs to the Nutanix AHV hypervisor in a matter of days. “Once the hardware was onsite and integrated into our network, the process was fairly painless,” explained Topolnicki. “We had a fully operational hyperconverged solution in place within about a day, and we were ready to begin migrating our existing workloads to the new platform. Nutanix provided step-by-step guidance on what to do and how to do it.” The Nutanix Prism management plane provides a centralized interface for all administration tasks, enhancing efficiency and reducing complexity.
Enhanced proactivity
The Nutanix platform has allowed the IT team at the Democratic Caucus to be more proactive rather than reactive in their daily operations. By consolidating various infrastructure components onto Nutanix, they have reduced the number of technical issues they face, which enables them to focus on more strategic initiatives. Topolnicki explained, "Instead of having to deal with incidences, we have the ability to take those time cycles and turn them toward innovating on our applications and use cases."
Improved reliability and stability
Nutanix has played a crucial role in improving the reliability of The Democratic caucus of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives IT environment by reducing service disruptions. This stability is crucial for ensuring that representatives can consistently serve their constituents without technical hindrances. “We appreciate the time saved and the sheer reliability of the system,” said Topolnicki. “The reliability of the way the Nutanix Control VMs work together, and the rock-solid hypervisor, has given us the best of both worlds.”
Time and cost savings
The House of Representatives Democratic Caucus has generated substantial time and cost benefits from the Nutanix infrastructure. By utilizing Nutanix, they have grown their infrastructure organically by 10-15% without significant additional investments. This scalability is crucial for efficiently managing growth and maintaining service quality. Astree noted, "The investment that we're making in the Nutanix ecosystem continues to pay dividends, meaning fewer investments are needed in other areas."
Cohesive data protection and disaster recovery
By centralizing its data on the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), the client has improved its data protection and disaster recovery capabilities. They no longer need to worry about whether different parts of their infrastructure are adequately backed up, as Nutanix supports seamless replication and backup across their environment. Yuri added, "We’ve been able to make sure that all of those workloads, all of those things that we put in the Nutanix hyperconvergence platform, we can protect, touch, and replicate, thanks to Nutanix."
Looking ahead, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives Democratic Caucus plans to expand its use of Nutanix solutions. They are considering the potential for further cloud integration, additional clusters, and the use of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) to enhance their data center capabilities.
Additionally, they are excited about the maturation of AI integration points and the potential for advanced features like a virtual Copilot to optimize their IT operations further. "The idea of having AI do things for us and with us, like an IT partner, is very appealing," said Yuri Topolnicki, drawing a parallel to the AI assistant Jarvis from the Iron Man movie franchise.
The client remains committed to leveraging Nutanix’s innovative and reliable solutions to continue serving its constituents effectively and efficiently.
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11/24