How the Fijian Elections Office replaced its ageing SAN legacy systems with a modern hyperconverged infrastructure from Lenovo.
The Fijian Elections Office (FEO) collects and stores huge volumes of voter registration and electoral data.
To support upcoming local and general elections, the FEO replaced aging server and storage systems with a modern hyperconverged infrastructure based on Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series with Nutanix Cloud Platform.
What is the Fijian Elections Office?
The FEO is an independent electoral management body based in Suva, Fiji. The role of the organisation is to conduct free and fair elections in a professional, just and transparent manner.
The Challenge
Elections play a critical role in any democracy and are usually the largest logistical exercise that a country conducts. Careful planning is essential to deliver successful outcomes on polling day, and technology has become a key enabler of this process for the FEO.
As its previous IT infrastructure approached end-of-life, the FEO began to experience performance and capacity issues – particularly in relation to data storage.
Asish Prakash, Manager IT infrastructure, FEO, said: “We are an extremely information-heavy organisation as we are required to collect and store huge volumes of voter registration and electoral data each election cycle. Our three legacy SAN systems were old and almost at capacity, so we often found ourselves moving large databases between the different arrays based on the needs of the organisation. As well as being time-consuming, this often resulted in downtime-which we simply cannot afford during an election cycle.”
“Technology is one of our key strategic pillars. We are always looking to adopt innovative technological solutions to enhance the delivery of electoral services.”
Total Transformation
The FEO worked with trusted partner VirtualFlex Fiji to evaluate its current and projected future compute and storage needs, as well as data centre floorspace, power and cooling requirements.
VirtualFlex Fiji determined that the best way to future-proof the FEO’s data centre was to move away from its existing three-tier architecture to a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution based on Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series with Nutanix Cloud Platform.
Supported by VirtualFlex Fiji, the FEO implemented four Lenovo ThinkAgile HX5531 Certified Nodes at its primary data centre, configured as a single pool of virtual resources. The team is currently working to deploy Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 V2 servers and a TS4300 Tape Library at its disaster recovery (DR) site for backups.
“What most attracted us to Nutanix Cloud Platform was the flexibility and scalability it offered. It gives you the advantages of cloud in the security of your own data centre,” said Prakash.
Results
The move to Nutanix Cloud Platform is acknowledged as transforming the FEO’s IT operations, bringing big improvements to capacity, performance and resiliency in a smaller, more cost-effective footprint that is much easier to manage.
The organisation replaced ten servers and three storage arrays with just four Lenovo ThinkAgile HX5331 Certified Nodes, all while increasing storage capacity to 65 TB.
“We’re currently only using around 30 TB, so we have plenty of headroom for growth going into the next election cycles,” said Prakash.
“Crucially, there’s no need to lift and shift databases between separate physical systems; we have ample resources to keep workloads running smoothly at all times.”
The FEO expects the consolidated footprint of the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX platform to reduce data centre power and cooling costs, delivering a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than its previous infrastructure. And because compute and storage resources are virtualised, the IT team can manage everything via a single pane of glass with the Nutanix Prism tool.
“Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series with Nutanix Cloud Platform has made life so much easier for me and my team. We have ample compute and storage resources to support operations and much less physical hardware to manage. This frees up valuable time and energy for other work, which is especially important with both local and national elections on the horizon.”
Why Lenovo?
For the FEO, Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series was the clear frontrunner when evaluating potential HCI solutions.
Prakash said: “Lenovo is one of the few technology vendors with a presence in Fiji. We met the Lenovo sales rep at an industry event in Suva and he often visits the island. Having that face-to-face communication and connection is important to us and gave us a lot of confidence in Lenovo. There’s also a Lenovo service centre in Fiji, which makes it much easier for us to get hold of spare parts and process warranties-again – this is not something that other major vendors provide.”
Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series was highly recommended not just by VirtualFlex Fiji, but other local businesses.
“Anecdotally, Nutanix is the most popular HCI software in Fiji,” said Prakash.
“We spoke to counterparts at the other organisations, and they all spoke highly of Nutanix technology.”
