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Major Japanese City Opts for Scalable Hyperconverged Infrastructure to Strengthen Information Security

Tokyo, Japan – February 21, 2017 – Nutanix (NASDAQ: NTNX), a leader in enterprise cloud computing, today announced an application virtualization project to achieve Internet Segregation for Sapporo City, the fifth largest population in Japan, and the largest city on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.

As part of the local government initiative driven by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Sapporo City is tasked to strengthen its information security by carrying out an internet segregation; a mechanism that prevents information leakage by separating the network connected to the internet from other business networks such as LGWAN (Integrated Administrative Network). For example, the city can choose to segregate secure email systems from other activities such as Internet browsing. As a result, a project was launched with Nutanix to virtualize specific applications and separate them from the existing environment.

In the current stage of the project, the city is virtualizing the Internet Explorer (IE) application. This project is at a testing stage, and the plan is to enable approximately 14,000 users with 80 virtual servers operating on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform.

Takuya Moro, Staff Official, Internal System, System Maintenance Section, Data Management System Department, General Affairs Bureau in Sapporo City was delightfully surprised by the time of preliminary verification. “During the test environment, when I copied 80 virtual machines, the task that normally took hours to complete on a regular IA server ended up finishing in less than 10 seconds with Nutanix. It was overwhelmingly quick.”

The virtualization was built using Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop. On a regular physical server, it would take about one to two minutes to start up a virtualized browser, but in a virtualized environment the time reduced to under a minute. When comparing between multiple hyperconverged infrastructures, the Nutanix platform was able to start up in less than 10 seconds.

The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform not only greatly shortens the time to construct the environment, but can also ease the burden of operation and boosts user convenience by allowing for faster startup times.

Nutanix is also used for system monitoring as a measure against information leakage. Satoshi Isobe, Staff Official, Internal System of the same section and who is in charge of the project, said that he had long been concerned about the management complexity due to the introduction of different systems for each project. “The mechanism to monitor is mainly the service that runs on the server. Since Nutanix is already being used in the internet separation project and it is expected to continue expanding with new projects, it would be better to move in a direction that can unify management,” added Isobe.