Cape Coral Relies on Nutanix for Applications During Emergencies

Nutanix, a leader in enterprise cloud computing, has announced that the City of Cape Coral, one of the largest cities in Florida, is leveraging the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software, including the AHV hypervisor, to help the city better prepare for and respond to disasters and ensure all emergency service applications run efficiently. By utilising the Nutanix solution, the team can seamlessly access their mission-critical applications and keep pace with other technological advancements in government, fire and police department applications.

In addition, the solution frees the team’s time so they no longer only have to focus on day-to-day IT infrastructure operations and management. They now have more time to spend on strategic initiatives, such as new software applications, process improvement initiatives and new projects.

Before deploying Nutanix, Cape Coral’s IT team had multiple data centres and solutions that were complex and required many different skill sets to manage. The applications the team is running on Nutanix go beyond traditional IT support and provide the city with numerous services, including ERP, land management applications, GIS and public safety software operations. When natural disasters, like Hurricane Irma, strike, they must ensure continued reliability and accessibility of public safety applications for the police and fire department including computer-aided dispatch (CAD), records management software for mobile software along with evidence retention archives.

After experiencing Nutanix first-hand, Cape Coral moved all production systems and mission-critical applications to Nutanix. They virtualised 98% of their environment and are now using AHV, the Nutanix built-in hypervisor, providing heightened simplicity and performance and eliminating costly licensing fees.

When Hurricane Irma hit, the team had to move their entire data centre to a new location in a four-hour period. Using Nutanix, the team has created an offsite disaster recovery centre with Nutanix software, which makes it easy for the city to quickly and easily failover critical applications, keeping them available and running in case of an emergency.

“It’s our responsibility to make sure that our police and fire department’s life-saving systems are always ready with back-ups in place and viable,” said Matt Vilord, ITC Manager, City of Cape Coral. “The solution has enabled us to vastly improve public safety for our citizens and understand our unique needs and challenges.”