Accelerating Database Operations at Enterprise Scale with Nutanix Database Service

In today’s always-on digital economy, databases must be fast to deploy, easy to manage, and resilient by design. Yet for many enterprises, database lifecycle operations—provisioning, patching, backup, recovery, and cloning—remain complex, manual, and risk-prone. As enterprises accelerate digital transformation initiatives, the ability to provision, protect, and scale databases with speed and consistency is a business critical, and not just an operational, concern. Recent enterprise-scale benchmarking conducted by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) highlights how Nutanix Database Service (NDB) transforms database operations through automation, consistency, and speed. The results of the database operations focused testing demonstrate how organizations may significantly reduce operational overhead, improve availability, and accelerate time-to-value by adopting a Database-as-a-Service approach powered by Nutanix. This report is intended for cloud and platform leaders, database administrators, and enterprise architects who are responsible for scaling and modernizing mission-critical databases in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

From Database Complexity to Operational Simplicity

Traditional database management often requires teams to manually coordinate infrastructure, storage, operating systems, and database engines—especially in high-availability (HA) environments. This complexity slows innovation, increases risk, and makes it difficult to scale.

Nutanix Database Service changes the equation. NDB delivers a unified, automated platform that orchestrates the full database lifecycle—from provisioning to recovery—using standardized profiles and policy-driven workflows. Instead of managing silos, teams manage outcomes.

Figure 1: Nutanix Database Service on Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure

Figure 1 illustrates the layered architecture of Nutanix Database Service, showing how NDB sits above Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure to provide database-aware automation across multiple engines and deployment models, including on-premises and cloud environments.

Proven at Enterprise Scale

To validate real-world readiness, TCS tested NDB under production-scale conditions using PostgreSQL, one of the most widely adopted enterprise databases. The environment included a 40 TB, three-node high-availability cluster and a fleet of 20 databases, reflecting the scale and complexity many enterprises operate today.

The results speak for themselves:

• High-availability cluster provisioning completed in under 30 minutes
• Rolling patching maintained availability while completing in under 10 minutes
• Bulk patching of 20 databases finished in just over 6 minutes
• Application-consistent snapshots completed in about 5 minutes
• Full database restores completed in approximately 22 minutes
• Snapshot-based cloning, including VM provisioning, completed in about 16 minutes

These outcomes demonstrate how NDB supports fast, predictable operations—without manual intervention or operational guesswork.

Why This Matters for the Business

For IT and database teams, the value of NDB goes beyond speed:

• Reduced operational risk through automated, repeatable workflows
• Improved security and compliance efforts through faster and more consistent patching
• Higher availability with rolling updates and application-consistent snapshots
• Faster innovation by enabling rapid cloning for development and testing
• Lower operational cost by minimizing manual effort and configuration drift

By abstracting complexity and embedding best practices into every workflow, NDB empowers teams to focus on strategic initiatives rather than day-to-day firefighting. By eliminating manual provisioning, organizations may lower operational costs while improving infrastructure utilization. Enterprises may lower licensing and platform costs through workload consolidation and simplified management models.

Key Takeaways

• Nutanix Database Service simplifies and automates the full database lifecycle
• Enterprise-scale operations complete in minutes, not hours or days
• High availability and consistency are built into every workflow
• Snapshot-based recovery and cloning accelerate resilience and innovation
• NDB delivers a true Database-as-a-Service experience for modern enterprises

TCS Delivered DBaaS: Real World Examples Powered by Nutanix

Building on years of close collaboration, TCS and Nutanix have brought the power of Nutanix Cloud Platform and Nutanix Database Services to global enterprise customers worldwide, enabling measurable improvements in agility, reliability, and cost efficiency across industries. Here are two real world examples of TCS and Nutanix customers benefiting from the Nutanix and TCS solution.

Global 2000 Retail Company

A global retailer modernized its database infrastructure by implementing a Database as a Service (DBaaS) platform to overcome complex architecture and manual database provisioning from their earlier 3-tier server plus external storage VMware environment to HCI Nutanix environment. The solution introduced automated, on-demand database provisioning, lifecycle management, and self-service capabilities using REST-based automation and orchestration.  The deployment extends across multiple global data centers, supporting hundreds of server nodes and thousands of Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases. As part of the transformation, hundred Oracle servers were migrated to Nutanix NDB platform and upgraded from Oracle 12c to Oracle 19c.

This initiative significantly improved operational performance by enabling faster time to market, higher operational efficiency, reduced risk of human errors, huge time savings on daily management, and improved availability. It also enhanced service delivery through automated provisioning, patching, monitoring, backup, and faster troubleshooting across multiple database technologies including Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB.

Global 2000 Financial Services Company

A leading U.S. financial services organization faced rising infrastructure complexity and high operational costs driven by a legacy network storage plus virtualization architecture. The environment created heavy reliance on IT and database teams, slowing innovation and application delivery. Additionally, increasing licensing costs for traditional databases and virtualization platforms significantly raised the total cost of ownership (TCO).

To modernize its infrastructure, the organization implemented Nutanix Enterprise Cloud along with Nutanix Database Service (NDB) to support mission-critical databases and enable a scalable Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) model.

The deployment now runs on 9,800+ database cores for PostgreSQL and SQL workloads and leveraging over 10 PB of Nutanix Unified Storage for volumes and file services. Managed services support, helps operate and optimize the platform.

By consolidating workloads onto Nutanix, the organization reported reductions in infrastructure footprint, licensing, and operational costs. The unified platform simplified operations, and enabled DB-as-Code capabilities, allowing developers to provision databases faster and accelerate release cycles.

Modernize Database Management with Nutanix and TCS 

Database-as-a-Service is now a core enterprise capability. TCS and Nutanix are helping CIOs simplify large-scale database operations, improve availability, and accelerate time-to-market—while lowering operational complexity and driving down total cost of ownership across the enterprise.

TCS at Nutanix .NEXT 2026

TCS will be at .NEXT 2026, Nutanix Annual User Conference being held at April 7-9 in Chicago as a Platinum SI sponsor. Please contact the TCS team at tcs@nutanix.com to schedule a planning session with the TCS-Nutanix team.