Forestry & Land Scotland embrace cloud technology

Author: Isha Jain

Nutanix has announced that Forestry & Land Scotland (FLS) has upgraded its data centre infrastructure to a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), selecting the Nutanix Cloud Platform to support a workload of 300 virtual machines. FLS opted for Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on Microsoft Azure. With Nutanix NC2, it has been able to migrate the whole data centre to Azure without the time, effort and expense of re-engineering applications for native deployment.

Founded in 2018 as part of the Scottish devolution process, FLS manages over 1.5 million acres of national forests and land. To meet the short term IT needs of a newly devolved Scottish government agency, at the same time, supporting its move to the public cloud in line with a cloud-first government policy, it was required to rapidly revamp its legacy on-premises data centre.

FLS was already using Microsoft Azure to provide for disaster recovery of its on-premise data centre, so naturally, the organisation first looked at re-engineering for native operation of its applications on that platform. It soon realised that NC2 for Azure would be a better, quicker and more cost-effective approach, enabling it to stretch its existing environment seamlessly into the cloud and migrate workflows at its own pace, without having to transform or re-engineer the code in any way.

The migration also offered immediate benefits in terms of both performance and on-demand scalability. It resulted in a significantly smaller data centre footprint, in terms of both physical space and power and cooling requirements.

As with the original data centre project, Mahlitz, Nutanix was able to help by arranging a proof of concept trial of Nutanix NC2 on Microsoft Azure involving actual FLS production workloads.