Fife Council modernizes infrastructure, reduces virtualization datacenter footprint by more than 80 percent with Azure Stack HCI

But like a lot of government organizations, the council relies on several older systems running in its on-premises datacenter. To continue delivering stellar public services efficiently and to bring greater cloud-first innovation to its customer transactions, Fife Council determined that it needed to modernize its on-premises digital infrastructure. It made this move with the Microsoft Azure Arc–enabled infrastructure called Azure Stack HCI.

Reaching for the cloud

Fife Council historically used VMware virtualization solutions to support its IT infrastructure, but it transitioned to Hyper-V a few years ago to reduce costs. The council needed to retain on-premises infrastructure to support certain older applications, but it wanted to adopt a cloud-first strategy to bring greater flexibility and resilience to its workloads. So, when the council found it had to replace its storage area network clusters, which were costly to maintain, it opted to implement Azure Stack HCI to consolidate its infrastructure and better position itself for future cloud benefits. Azure Stack HCI is a hyperconverged infrastructure solution that organizations use to run virtualized workloads in a hybrid manner, to bring the power of cloud capabilities to on-premises infrastructure.

Ewan Campbell, Technical and Delivery Lead Officer at Fife Council, recalls, “We had a five-year plan to move to Azure Stack HCI and tap into the Azure cloud platform, and we decided that whatever hardware we bought had to be compatible with Azure Stack HCI in the future.” Initially, the CPU core costs for Azure Stack HCI were too high for the council. But a timely change in the Azure Stack HCI licensing model involving the Software Assurance program and Azure Hybrid Benefit made it cost-effective for the council. Working with Acuutech—a member of the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program—as its implementation partner, and Lenovo as its hardware provider, Fife Council quickly and easily transitioned from Windows Server hosts to Azure Stack HCI. Acuutech’s expertise and efficiency helped complete configuration and implementation in less than a week.

The council’s environment consists of a primary five-node cluster with roughly 550 virtual machines (VMs) for production and a secondary two-node cluster of approximately 200 VMs for testing, development, and resilience. In conjunction with Azure Stack HCI, Fife Council uses Azure Arc to extend its clusters to the cloud and manage them in the Azure portal, Azure Monitor to have complete visibility over its stack, and Azure Site Recovery to replicate workloads to Azure for advanced disaster recovery. It’s also beginning to deploy Azure Virtual Desktop across its organization along with Microsoft Sentinel to help secure its environment.

Reducing costs and datacenter footprint

As a result of its modernization efforts, Fife Council now gleans greater value from its IT estate. Plus, it has reduced both its costs and its datacenter footprint, all while positioning itself to realize future advantages of having a cloud-connected architecture. The council migrated its older workloads, which were set to stop receiving security updates by the end of 2023, to Azure Stack HCI to keep them under management and protection. Campbell says, “We have hundreds of VMs running on Windows Server 2012, and we would have had to pay for extended support. One of the biggest benefits of using Azure Stack HCI is that we can place those workloads under extended support without incurring extra cost.”

Fife Council optimized its use of on-premises hardware through the move to Azure Stack HCI. Campbell says, “By moving to Azure Stack HCI, we’ve gone from three full racks of hardware down to less than half a rack. We had a big, power-hungry infrastructure before, but now we can run more efficiently and cost-effectively.”

By reducing its on-premises hardware, the council can save both power and maintenance costs. These cost savings are paramount and translate to good stewardship of public money. “We need to spend public funds carefully,” says Campbell. “With Azure Stack HCI, we’re lowering costs and achieving hardware and revenue savings for our citizens.”

The shift to Azure Stack HCI helps council IT staff work more efficiently too, spending less time on patching and monitoring and more time on value-driving projects. Campbell says, “Before, we needed dedicated people to manage things like systems management and storage. Now, the single pane of glass we have with Azure Arc and Azure Stack HCI makes things far easier—it’s great.” IT staff work cross-functionally, proactively, and innovatively, which is more productive and satisfying than working to keep the lights on. Fife Council’s newly enabled cloud access also has enhanced its monitoring capabilities. The council had long used Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager to conduct its environment monitoring, but with Azure Monitor, it saw an opportunity to retire that system. “With Azure Monitor, we were able to evolve our monitoring capabilities, and we can now conduct all of our monitoring in the cloud,” says Campbell.

The leapfrog effect

Through its adoption of Azure Stack HCI, Fife Council accelerated its digital architecture journey. “I would say we’ve used Azure Stack HCI to bring our cloud-first strategy forward by five years,” says Campbell. The council is now in the driver’s seat when it comes to digital infrastructure decisions. If for cost, scale, or performance reasons it makes sense to run a workload in the cloud, it can do that effortlessly, and it can continue to support its older applications on-premises. “Using Azure Stack HCI gives us the freedom to do what we want,” he adds. “We have choices, and this changes the way we work going forward.”

The shift to Azure Stack HCI positions the council to realize ongoing cost benefits. Campbell concludes, “We now have the agility, through Azure Stack HCI, to use the most cost-effective solution, whether that’s on-premises or in the cloud. We’ve got the best of both worlds!”

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