Hutt City Council serves more than 100,000 residents in Lower Hutt. In early 2024 its managed service provider threatened to withdraw access to the council’s backup infrastructure and data unless the council agreed to significantly higher contract terms. At the same time, the council’s on-premises Nutanix environment was approaching end of support.
We have written up how the council dealt with both problems in a short customer use case. This post gives the summary. The PDF has the detail.
Download the case study: Hutt City Council Customer Use Case (PDF)
What the council needed
Two things, in order. First, backups that did not depend on the previous provider. Second, a long-term hybrid cloud plan: hosted infrastructure, disaster recovery across two separate sites, and room for new workloads such as GPU-accelerated GIS.
What ASI did
ASI Solutions delivered the work in three phases.
Phase 1: Backup rescue and cloud migration
ASI replicated the council’s critical backups to ASI Cloud and reconfigured data protection so it no longer relied on the previous provider. In parallel, core workloads moved from the on-premises Nutanix environment to ASI Cloud IaaS in Auckland, with dedicated networking between council sites and the cloud. Around 39 TiB of virtual machines were migrated.
Phase 2: On-premises modernisation
ASI then took on the rest of the infrastructure change: the server build-out, migrating workloads from VMware vCenter to Nutanix AHV, restructuring the on-premises backup strategy, and deploying an onsite Nutanix cluster. The council now runs a hybrid model, with the cloud carrying core production and disaster recovery and the onsite cluster handling local workloads. Our Nutanix migration guide covers the VMware to AHV move in more depth.
Phase 3: Full-scale disaster recovery failover
The council had never run a full DR failover. Rather than a test exercise, it committed to a live production failover from the start. ASI ran it after hours, moving workloads from the Auckland data centre to ASI’s Christchurch site. The failover covered domain controller replication, network connectivity and firewall configuration. The council now has a DR capability it has proven in practice, with real geographic separation inside New Zealand. See our DRaaS guide for what a tested failover should include.
Next: GPU as a Service for ArcGIS
The council will deploy GPU-enabled virtual machines in ASI’s Auckland data centre to run Esri ArcGIS workloads. GPU as a Service gives it that capability without buying and hosting GPU hardware on premises.
ASI Cloud services used
| Service | What it covers |
|---|---|
| IaaS | Nutanix-based infrastructure in ASI’s Auckland data centre |
| DRaaS | Disaster recovery between Auckland and Christchurch |
| BaaS | Backup as a Service on Cohesity |
| GPU as a Service | GPU-enabled virtual machines for Esri ArcGIS workloads |
| Platform migration | VMware vCenter to Nutanix AHV |
The outcome
What started as an emergency response has become a long-term hybrid cloud partnership. Hutt City Council runs on two geographically separated New Zealand data centres, has a tested DR capability, and can add new services as its needs change.
The full use case covers the challenge, each phase and the outcomes on two pages.
Download the case study: Hutt City Council Customer Use Case (PDF)
If your council is in a similar position, book a meeting with the ASI Cloud team or read about disaster recovery on ASI Cloud.