Managed service provider (MSP) SMART Technology has cut its backup times by approximately 70% and its resource usage by about 60% with a hyperconverged solution from Nutanix.
As a successful MSP, SMART Technology understands the necessity to stay one step ahead of the technology game when ensuring a quality service to its clients. When the company decided to embark on a technology refresh, it identified Nutanix as a technology partner that met its requirements and offered a solution that could work within its existing environment.
SMART’s goal was to leverage Nutanix to consolidate and replace its legacy systems. It also wanted to take an already successful business to the next level by increasing the performance of its cloud server environment and at the same time provide a single, intuitive management pane for both internal support teams and customers.
“As a cloud service provider, we can’t afford to go down and we have to continually provide customers with a fresh approach to how we deliver our services – this is critical for us to stay ahead in a competitive market. In short, we were looking for a simpler, more consolidated way to do more with less,” says Linda Morris, sirector of Smart Technology.
“Our mandate to Nutanix was that its technology had to support our demands to drive efficiency with a faster rate of customer provisioning and onboarding, but also provide us with the confidence that our foundations would continue to meet our stringent performance expectations for both speed and resiliency.
“This meant time spent on resource intensive administration tasks had to be reduced. As part of this, we also had to gain more visibility into our forecasting and budgeting for a smooth hardware scale out.”
After hearing about Nutanix from an existing customer, the company settled on a three-node cluster solution that replaced its legacy environment and effectively plugged into the company’s server infrastructure.
“Our customers run multiple operating system vendors for their workloads, and we wanted a solution that could deal with these requirements,” says Morris. “The Nutanix AHV enterprise-ready hypervisor enables us to deliver this. We have an incredible team of technical experts, who found it easy to deploy, with the initial implementation taking a minimal amount of time to complete.”
As a result, SMART’s technical teams are spending fewer resources administering and maintaining multiple virtual environments and analysing performance bottlenecks says Morris.
“Using Nutanix we have reduced the overall complexity of the environment,” she notes. “Nutanix has given us back the one thing money can’t buy: time to focus on things that can contribute to the bottom line.
“Even though it is still early days with our implementation, we are already looking at potential additional modules and an additional block,” says Morris. “Future operations are moving towards an automated provisioning model. We’re talking to our partners because we have also become a reseller of Nutanix solutions as well as those customers who do not want to go all-in into the cloud, about migrating to Nutanix on premise and offering them a disaster recovery service via our cloud.”