Case Study: South Taranaki District Council achieves 30–60% faster application response and scales VDI to 80 users with Nutanix

New Zealand District Council Resolves VDI Performance Issues with Nutanix

South Taranaki District Council, a New Zealand local government serving about 30,000 residents with 200 staff, faced severe performance problems after deploying a VMware View VDI—logins and application response times were unacceptably slow and overall performance degraded with as few as 10 virtual desktops. Their existing HP SAN (a NZ$500,000 investment) could not deliver the required storage IOPS and would have needed a further NZ$190,000 upgrade, putting the VDI project at risk.

The Council deployed a 4‑node Nutanix NX‑2000 converged storage-and-compute cluster, eliminating the SAN and cutting costs by NZ$400,000. Performance improved dramatically — application response times dropped 30–60% (example: logon time from 26s to 13s), virtual desktops scaled from 10 to 80 with linear performance, the financial system sped up ~50%, and all business-critical apps were migrated to the new platform while management and support became simpler.

South Taranaki District Council

Stephen Mileham

Senior Systems Engineer, South Taranaki District Council