Maryland Lottery Bets on Nutanix—and Wins Big!

公司

马里兰州彩票是马里兰州政府的独立机构。它的游戏包括Mega Millions，Powerball，Multi-Chatch，Ken​​o，Bonus Match 5和许多刮擦门票。自1973年成立以来，该彩票已为马里兰州创造了超过150亿美元的收入。

INDUSTRY

政府机关

BUSINESS NEEDS

老化的IBM Bladeservers和Legacy Storage Systems难以管理和运行较低的容量。

SOLUTION

• nutanix企业云平台
• Nutanix Xpress
• Nutanix AHV
• 棱镜和棱镜专业管理解决方案

BENEFITS

• Reduced deployment time from 2 weeks to less than 4 hours
• Cut ongoing management overhead in half
• Reduced VM restore time from days to minutes
• Consolidated 3 server racks of legacy infrastructure, to just 6U of Nutanix

CHALLENGE

马里兰州彩票的IT环境包括广泛的旧服务器和存储系统，包括几台具有直接存储的IBM BladeCenter服务器。传统基础架构用于支持所有企业和业务办公室应用程序，包括彩票的Microsoft Dynamics会计和总分类帐系统，帮助台应用程序，网站，操作工具，Splunk应用程序，Splunk应用程序，域控制器，MS SQL数据库和备份基础结构。

由于传统的3层环境的复杂性，彩票的IT团队花费了太多时间来管理这些不同的服务器和存储基础架构。当是时候刷新老化系统时，他们开始寻找更具成本效益和更易于管理的旧环境的替代方案。

SOLUTION

The Maryland Lottery started its search by going down the ‘traditional solution path,’ upgrading its existing IBM BladeCenter servers and adding more NetApp storage systems. But since the Lottery always likes to stay ahead of the curve on new technologies, they decided to expand the search to include some of the more innovative hyperconverged systems. “After researching the options, we identified Nutanix as a leader in Enterprise Clouds and hyperconverged systems and added them to our list of solutions to evaluate,” noted Jeff Patchen, CIO of the Maryland Lottery.

彩票征求了出价和评估选项，以初始购买成本，系统绩效和易于管理。“ Nutanix Enterprise Cloud平台将服务器，存储和网络组件的紧密集成到一个易于管理的解决方案中，这是超置体系结构背后的原理。这是我们决定选择Nutanix的重要因素。”

马里兰州的彩票能够购买两个Nutanix群集，一个用于其主要数据中心，另一个用于其备份站点。Patchen指出：“我们能够为两个数据中心购买计算和存储，并在站点之间实时复制。”“那时与Nutanix一起去的决定很容易。”

RESULTS

更快的实施和较小的足迹

It used to take more than two weeks to deploy the legacy IBM BladeServers and NetApp storage systems. In contrast, the Lottery’s IT team was able to bring up the Nutanix production system in less than four hours. Additionally, they were able to consolidate three server racks of legacy infrastructure down to just 6U with Nutanix, saving even more on datacenter footprint and power.

切割管理一半

Patchen解释说：“您永远不会意识到IT解决方案有多困难，直到您将其替换为更好的东西。”“我们能够将服务器和存储管理时间切成两半，如果不多。”

The Maryland Lottery’s IT team is now using Nutanix Prism Pro to manage the hyperconverged environment. “Prism Pro makes it possible to check both of our clusters from one centralized console,” explained Brad Burgess, systems administrator at the Maryland Lottery. “We now have the capability to easily drill down into any issues we might be having, and capacity forecasting is also much easier.”

“I like the fact that as a CIO, I can easily keep an eye on the entire environment,” added Patchen. “With one click, I can look at all of our storage resources and memory utilization, and see a high-level dashboard of both clusters. It’s nice to be able to go to one place and see all of the metrics I need without having to ask my staff to create and send me status reports.”

更好的性能

Once they migrated to Nutanix, the Lottery’s end users noticed major performance improvements across the entire environment. Access to file servers, response times for the Web servers, and even the backups are running much faster. “Everything is running twice as fast now,” noted Burgess.

Improving Backup and Disaster Recovery

马里兰州的彩票还获得了Metro Vausability，这是Nutanix解决方案，即使在全场灾难期间，也可以使客户无缝地保持应用程序。他们每小时都使用Metro的可用性将所有生产工作负载复制到彩票的DR网站上。Metro的可用性提供了在几分钟内还原VM的能力，而不必从备份磁带或其他类型的备份进行完整还原。伯吉斯说：“有了我们以前的系统，该过程花费了数小时甚至几天。”“我们现在有了一个真正，快速的响应备份站点，可以帮助我们在任何灾难发生后重新站起来。”

Great Support

“I have been extremely impressed with Nutanix Support,” Patchen reported. “All of the service reps have been very responsive to our issues or questions. Even the director of support checks in with us in person on a regular basis to make sure we’re receiving the level of care that we need.” With other IT vendors, the Maryland Lottery typically selected ‘four-hour response’ contracts for hardware replacement. They are so confident in the architecture and setup of the Nutanix environment, they chose ‘next business day’ support, due to the high availability and redundancy of the clusters.

使用Nutanix Xpress进行ICS

The Multi-State Lottery Association (MUSL) is a non-profit, government-benefit association owned and operated by its member lotteries. For lotteries to participate in Powerball drawings, they need to be compliant with MUSL’s rules. One of the MUSL requirements is to have a separate internal control system (ICS) to reconcile transactions against the gaming systems, to ensure the integrity of the transactions and to prevent any sort of fraud or malicious activity related to the lottery games.

The Maryland Lottery recently purchased two Nutanix Xpress nodes to run its internal control system. Nutanix offers solutions for smaller deployments with the advantages of one-click infrastructure management, performance acceleration, capacity optimization, and converged local backups. “Our ICS needs to be segregated from our existing environment in a separate domain, with separate servers,” explained Patchen. “We felt that the best way to accomplish that and also get high availability was to deploy it on Nutanix Xpress.”

从VMware迁移到AHV

The Maryland Lottery also made the decision to run AHV, Nutanix’s native hypervisor, in the Xpress environment. AHV is pre-installed with Nutanix Xpress, but the solution also supports Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESXi if desired. “After evaluating how well AHV works for our ICS and Xpress deployment, we are strongly considering migrating our entire production environment to AHV to eliminate VMware licensing costs,” Patchen said.

下一步

在Nutanix上虚拟化IC

马里兰州彩票现在正计划在Nutanix上虚拟化其ICS环境。Patchen报道：“据我所知，尽管一些国际组织已经实现了这一目标，但美国还没有其他彩票虚拟化了其ICS环境。”“通过转到Nutanix Enterprise Cloud平台，我们获得了虚拟化ICS系统的信心。Nutanix使我们能够在美国彩票行业中打破新的地面。”