Improving Database Performance with Nutanix Era

Powering many mission-critical applications for state and local agencies, databases are the foundation for building digital government, including citizen services, operations and budget planning, data-driven policy design, etc. Unfortunately, the IT teams for most organizations spend an inordinate amount of time performing critical patches or otherwise struggling to keep databases operating efficiently. There are a number of common challenges with databases.

• Complexity: Existing database infrastructure often becomes very complex to manage—with excessive unmanaged and outdated copies leading to database creep. Many databases are siloed according to database type and workloads so as not to impact performance or cause disruption to public mission services, but siloes create multiple challenges for operations and data management. Database cloning and refresh can be complex, often taking days to complete. In addition, approximately half of data management implementations use both on-premises and cloud environments, furthering database sprawl and management complexity. Administrators who cannot meet increasing demands on the database end up missing SLAs.
• Slow Speed: Provisioning can take days or weeks to provide a database to users. Database infrastructure cannot scale fast enough to meet organizational demands. This slows decision making, reduces productivity, increases costs, and prevents employees from focusing on strategic tasks and IT innovation.
• Expenses: Many government organizations are experiencing runaway costs to operate and maintain overprovisioned database infrastructure—and are under pressure to bring down IT expenses. Traditional methods of database management are manual, slow, and complex, inevitably leading to increased costs. Managing IT complexity demands significant process overhead for executing even basic tasks, such as adding additional capacity or upgrading software—adding unwanted costs and friction to IT operations. Lack of flexibility and limited choices for modern hybrid cloud solutions can also lead to increased costs.
• Patching and Downtime: For government organizations, patching and updating involve multiple applications, infrastructure, and teams. Backup and recovery can also consume a lot of time. Employees can spend long hours working overtime and weekends, interrupting public service workflows. Any downtime comes at a price. Downtime on database platforms costs organizations on average over $8,850 per minute and $531,000 per hour.

What if you could deliver a modern platform for your databases that could reduce downtime to almost zero—with no public data loss in the event of a failure? What if backup and recovery could be completed in 3 minutes instead of 3 hours? What if customers could prevent data losses of up to $35,000 per hour just on patching alone?

Nutanix Era platform for databases helps state and local government dramatically increase the speed of database provisioning, providing a 6X improvement in database performance. Nutanix Era is a software-defined tool that dramatically automates and simplifies database management, bringing one-click simplicity and invisible operation to database provisioning and lifecycle management.

Nutanix Era is a great tool to give database administrators more precision and control over the database environment while still allowing core IT to handle the back end. Government and education customers can simplify and consolidate their disparate databases under a single management pane no matter the database—with no performance degradation and while leveraging one-click operations to simplify management.

Furthermore, Nutanix does not require you to rebuild your databases in a new environment. You can simply slide under the existing environment and add functionality. Era is the ultimate choice for deployment with seamless data mobility, offering several advantages:

• Reduced Complexity: Administrators can reduce their administration load by as much as 90% and overtime by 50%, freeing them up to focus on more mission-critical tasks that ultimately aid their organization—and reclaim their weekends.
• Improved ROI: An independent study showed that customers who switched to Era were able to generate an average ROI of 291% over 5 years and payback within 6 months. They could also decrease database storage costs by 60% with zero-byte cloning. Customers who move to Era save up to 40% on their hardware footprint (capex) and reduce operational costs by as much as 62%.
• Consolidation: Era helps manage sprawling, ephemeral environments, providing simplicity and peace of mind through consolidation. Era is a single vendor solution that gives complete hybrid cloud deployment choice.
• Provisioning: Working very closely with customers in the government and education industry, Nutanix decreased database wait times from up to 3 weeks down to just 30 minutes. As a result, customers improve their database provisioning speeds by an average of 97%, helping to accelerate their time-to-value by as much as 8X. Organizations can provision across multiple clusters, on both hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
• Patching: Patching time can be reduced by more than 50%, making it a one-hour task, with no downtime or interruption to public service. Staff can reduce overtime and devote energy to high-value tasks.