Sapporo is the largest city in Hokkaido with a population of 1.96 million people.

It combines the functions of an urban city including buildings and residences with those of a natural city in the suburbs.

The Sapporo ICT Utilisation Strategy was developed to help it to solve the issues it faces, promoting the elimination of labour shortages, productivity improvement, and sustainable urban development through ICT.

The city first used a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solution from Nutanix to modernise and improve the efficiency of its on-premises data centre.

Later, the need to renew its infrastructure while keeping costs down, as well as disaster preparedness and other considerations, made rapid procurement of flexible IT resources a challenge.

By selecting NC2 on AWS, it led to the creation of a hybrid cloud environment, including its modern data centre, that will enable it to scale-up its IT, as needed, without significant expenditure.

NC2 on AWS has reduced Sapporo City’s IT complexity and operational burdens because it enables applications to be managed on-premises and in the cloud, on Amazon EC2 bare metal infrastructure, using a single interface.

This also resulted in Sapporo City’s smooth deployment without the impact that could have been caused by delivery delays if additional network equipment, servers, and switches were needed due to the recent global shortage of semiconductors.

Currently, security-related workloads are being run in the cloud, and Sapporo City’s plan is to migrate its internal IT systems, portal, and external websites to the cloud in the future.

“With the support of Nutanix and iret, the NC2 on AWS environment was up and running in a short period of time, allowing for smooth operations throughout the entire project. We will continue to work closely with Nutanix and iret to provide better services to Sapporo City in the future,” said Otsuka Sapporo LA sales section Satoru Isobe.

“iret worked closely with Nutanix and Sapporo City to implement NC2 on AWS, which enables seamless connectivity between on-premises and cloud environments,” said iret deputy general manager cloud integration Hiroki Tachibana.

“We also procured the necessary on-premises equipment, created a virtual private cloud (VPC) environment, provided the circuits that connect to the VPC, and procured various software licenses to smoothly construct a new environment with a hybrid cloud configuration.”

This first appeared in the subscription newsletter CommsWire on 29 July 2022.