Case Studies

©2019 Nutanix, Inc. All Rights Reserved "Our goal is to make San Francisco one of the safest large cities in the US, but we also want to prevent the crimes from happening in the first place. That's where our outreach programs come into place," noted Herman Brown, CIO. Brown and his team are responsible for supporting the IT needs of the agency's 320 attorneys and staff members, and up to 100 student interns that work in the office throughout the year. "The role of technology in the DA's Office has become increasingly important over the past few years," Brown said. "There has been a steady progression of IT from just being a support center, to having a seat at the table with the executive team where we talk about overall agency strategy and direction, and examine how technology can us help meet our goals." One of the biggest challenges Brown faces as CIO is keeping up with the ever-increasing expectations of the agency's end users, while staying within the allocated IT budget. "My primary goal is to implement all of the new applications and innovative technologies our employees need to be productive, ensuring that everything runs as simply, reliably, and quickly as possible — within our annual budget," explained Brown. SOLUTION Brown and his team started looking for new IT infrastructure to replace the aging HPE server environment in 2018. The team evaluated several hyperconverged solutions, including Nutanix Enterprise, Dell EMC VxRail, and Scale Computing HC3. "We created a matrix of the pros, cons, and benefits of each solution. Nutanix was the clear winner in every measure, including performance, cost, and reliability," Brown reported. The DA's Office made the decision to purchase Nutanix OS software and deploy it on HPE ProLiant hardware. "We've always been happy with our HPE servers – it's a solid solution. Finding out that Nutanix was compatible with HPE was just the icing on the cake," said Brown. The DA's Office is now running all of its enterprise, legal, and office productivity applications file sharing and print servers, DHCP, Active Directory, and SQL Server workloads on the Nutanix platform. CUSTOMER OUTCOME More Time to Innovate The move to Nutanix has eliminated nearly all of the overhead and maintenance tasks associated with the legacy infrastructure. "With Nutanix, we've cut the time required to manage the environment in half," said Brown. "We currently have about 30 IT projects on our radar, so there are always plenty of more important things our team can work on instead of just managing infrastructure." Brown and his team are also using Nutanix's analytics and dashboards to present information in real-time, not only for the IT support services staff, but for the entire agency. "When anyone comes to us for assistance, they can look at the Nutanix dashboard and see all of the information they need. That saves a lot of time for our end users, and also enables our IT team to focus on more strategic projects." Keeping Up with the Influx of New Data The separate worlds of technology and law have collided in a big way recently with the rollout of body-worn cameras by police officers. Surveillance, video, Nest, and other monitoring solutions are now available to the average citizen. As a result, a large number of the DA's cases now involve cellphone video evidence or photos people have taken on the street. "Being able to determine where defendants have been and placing them at the scene of a crime is huge in solving our cases," explained Brown. "We also developed a forensic lab in our office where we can do social media tracking, and pinpoint cellphone usage based upon cellular triangulation. Criminals are becoming

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