Like many local governments across Texas, the City of Lubbock faced a critical infrastructure refresh while confronting rising virtualization costs, increasing demands on IT, and the need to maximize every taxpayer dollar. What began as a routine technology renewal quickly became a strategic evaluation of whether maintaining the status quo was still the best path forward.

For years, the City relied on VMware virtualization running on incumbent OEM servers and storage. As licensing costs increased and infrastructure renewal approached, City leaders challenged a common assumption: should they simply renew the existing environment, or was there a better way?

Rather than defaulting to a familiar solution, the City took a business-first approach. Working alongside SHI and technology partners, the team carefully validated support requirements, warranties, compatibility, and operational risk to ensure any new architecture would meet the performance and reliability demands of both enterprise IT and public safety workloads.

The result was a transformation that extended far beyond a hardware refresh. The City migrated from VMware virtualization running on incumbent OEM servers and storage to a Nutanix-based hyperconverged infrastructure platform utilizing AHV virtualization and modern Pure Storage all-flash storage. The modernization delivered two key advantages: reduced licensing complexity with greater long-term cost predictability, and simplified operations through a unified platform that streamlined management across infrastructure components.

By leveraging independent engineering expertise, creating a competitive evaluation process, and focusing on business outcomes rather than vendor preferences, the City modernized critical infrastructure while avoiding approximately $1.7 million in additional costs compared to remaining with the incumbent approach.

In an era of tightening budgets and growing demands for digital services, the City of Lubbock's story demonstrates how public-sector organizations can challenge conventional thinking, reduce operational risk, modernize critical services, and achieve significant financial savings without sacrificing performance, reliability, or supportability.

Attendees Will Learn

• How to evaluate infrastructure modernization options when virtualization costs are rising.
• Lessons learned from migrating away from a legacy VMware-based environment.
• How independent engineering expertise can help validate architecture decisions and reduce implementation risk.
• Strategies for creating competitive infrastructure evaluations that prioritize business outcomes over vendor lock-in.
• Practical approaches to achieving substantial cost savings while supporting mission-critical public sector workloads.