Customers

63 Moons Creates Digital Markets Powered by Nutanix

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud helps a global leader empower companies across industries to build digital businesses

INDUSTRY

Financial Services

BENEFITS

  • Enabled greater business insight with enterprise resource planning applications performing 30% better 
  • Accelerated business projects with on-the-fly scalability of Nutanix platform
  • Boosted resourcing in security thanks to one-click upgrades reducing the need for routine infra management
  • Gained 99.999% uptime with high availability and snapshots reducing crash recovery times by 90% 
  • Consolidated five racks to one saving the company around $100,000 a year 
  • Reduced spend on IT annual maintenance contracts by $50,000 a year

SOLUTION

  • Nutanix AHV
  • Nutanix Prism Pro

APPLICATION

  • SAP for enterprise resource planning (ERP)
  • Microsoft SQL Server databases
  • Active Directory
  • Netwrix auditing
  • Jira deployment
  • Business workflow management systems
  • Web services

BUSINESS BENEFITS

63 Moons Technologies Limited provides technology for businesses and startups to digitally disrupt industries in India such as financial information and payment services. They greenlight customers’ digital enterprises without IT concerns thanks to the scalability, stability, performance and one-click upgrades on their Nutanix Enterprise Cloud. Plus, the IT team can deliver back to the 63 Moons business a higher-performing and more cost-effective IT stack whose simplified management allows the company to focus more resources on infrastructure security.

You may be a leader in your field, but the world is changing, and new business models are appearing through digitization. We’re working with Nutanix so we can remain out-in-front and enable our customers to convert their digital ideas into solid business ventures. No-one thought the COVID-19 lockdown in India would be called overnight. However, thanks to our investment in Nutanix, we spun up servers within hours for secured remote access, so staff could work safely from home. All our companies have been working remotely for 4 weeks now without downtime or latency.

– Neehar Pathare, Vice President of ICT, 63 Moons Technologies Limited

CHALLENGES

‘A New Name and a New Vision’ was the slogan for 63 Moons when they launched in 2016. Formerly known as Financial Technologies (FTIL), 63 Moons aims to build on the success of FTIL, whose flagship securities trading platform ODIN still holds around 80 percent market share in India. 63 Moons plans to take the expertise that FTIL accumulated over 35 years for businesses and startups to digitally disrupt industries in India such as financial information and payment services using next-gen IT platforms.

When customers are companies or startups trying to get a foothold in payment gateway or 24/7 market information services, you can’t afford downtime because those customers will either crash out or switch to a different technology provider. Neehar Pathare, Vice President of ICT at 63 Moons says, “We wouldn’t have become a leader in finance-related markets if customers couldn’t rely on our technology around-the-clock.”

Neehar doesn’t hold back when describing the challenges 63 Moons faced running their three-tier infrastructure. “Whenever we made an upgrade or applied a security patch, we were battling against downtime. There was an administrator for servers, one for storage, another for networking and one for our VMware hypervisor. Scheduling upgrades and patches were onerous, plus our annual maintenance costs across the stack were rising.” It wasn’t only the customer-facing systems Neehar had to worry about. The same three-tier stack was also running 63 Moons’ business critical SAP, Microsoft SQL, Active Directory, business workflow management systems and web services. “Our IT needed to move on from a three-tier structure,” he says.

SOLUTION

Although 63 Moons considered a public cloud, the company chose the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud owing to its low latency for key applications. What’s more, because the solution is on-premise, 63 Moons stayed compliant with financial regulations on cloud-based data. Neehar adds, “If Nutanix could deliver only 50 percent of what it promised, we’d be more than satisfied.”

Without a proof of concept, 63 Moons went straight to implementation, deploying a three-node Nutanix NX-3060 cluster with the Nutanix AHV hypervisor and Nutanix Prism Pro for one-click management. To that, 63 Moons then added a seven-node Nutanix NX-8035 cluster, adding a further five nodes 12 months later, and migrating their entire three-tier virtualized stack to the Nutanix Cloud Platform. “We reduced the footprint in the data center from five racks to one,” says Neehar. “We could rent out the space in the four empty racks to other companies—recouping around $100,000 a year for the business.”

Today, all of 63 Moons’ business-critical systems, including SAP and Microsoft SQL, are running on the Nutanix platform. The same platform is also supporting the Atom Technologies’ payment gateway, used by many thousands of Indian businesses, and TickerPlant, which serves stock market information from 36 exchanges in real time in multiple formats. Comments Neehar, “Why run all this on Nutanix? Because Nutanix meets what we require—resiliency, scalability and performance.”

CUSTOMER OUTCOME

“Application performance has increased by 30 percent with Nutanix,” says Neehar. For those using the SAP system, for example, that means faster load times, quicker business insight and ultimately better decisionmaking. Also, by migrating from VMware to Nutanix, the company has made savings on licensing costs of around $19,500 a year. 63 Moons can also scale out the platform on-the-fly for projects. “A business team came to us recently because they wanted to buy Jira, a software solution for developers,” says Neehar. “They asked how long they would need to wait for the hardware. I said don’t worry, your hardware will be ready before you even procure the software. They were shocked.”

The nightmare of downtime is over with one-click software and firmware upgrades through the Prism management plane. “We’re achieving 99.999 percent uptime with high availability, and snapshots have reduced crash recovery times by 90 percent,” says Neehar. Instead of multiple administrators for multiple tiers and the hypervisor, 63 Moons has just one administer to oversee the entire platform. “We have redeployed administrators to areas such as infrastructure security, which is key to maintaining our ISO 20000 and 27000 certifications,” says Neehar. “Plus, they can always switch back to infrastructure administration to cover a colleague’s absence. Personally, since we migrated to Nutanix I have greater peace of mind because I know we can meet both the business’s and our customers’ needs today and tomorrow.”

The business need suddenly changed recently as a result of COVID-19. Because of the emergency, 63 Moons had to enable personnel to work remotely. Says Neehar, “No-one thought the COVID-19 lockdown in India would be called overnight. However, thanks to our investment in Nutanix, we spun up servers within hours for secured remote access, so staff could work safely from home. All our companies have been working remotely for 4 weeks now without downtime or latency.”

NEXT STEPS

63 Moons is migrating the last few applications to the Nutanix platform. Once done, the company will have consolidated their IT on a single, hyperconverged platform from a single solution provider. “I won’t need to have multiple conversations with several IT vendors because we have just one supplier—Nutanix,” Neehar says. “For the company, that means an annual saving on support contracts of $50,000, and, for me personally, I can focus on IT projects to continue driving our business forward.”