INDUSTRY
Transportation/Logistics
BENEFITS
- 40% reduction in operational expenditure by moving from MSP to in-house management via simple integrated management console
- Immediate improvement in application performance
- “Enhanced agility through one-click scalability
- No-cost virtualisation by switching to the Nutanix AHV hypervisor
- Greater availability using integrated data replication and disaster recovery tools
- Capacity to build a hybrid cloud for future workload scalability
SOLUTION
- Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Platform
- Prism management plane
- Nutanix AHV hypervisor
Applications
CHALLENGES
When Brian Roche was appointed Director of Information Technology at Belfast City Airport he was tasked with enhancing the airport’s IT services to cope with anticipated growth whilst, at the same time, reining in escalating costs. That, however, was to prove a far from simple task calling for the wholesale replacement of the existing IT infrastructure, a switch in operating model and the addition of much needed disaster recovery capabilities. And all without busting the budget.
“Not only was our existing 3-tier infrastructure coming to end of life, it lacked the scalability required to cope with expected growth,” he explains. “Our business agility was, similarly, limited by the existing managed service agreement, on top of which we were making do and with only basic backup facilities and were poorly equipped to cope should the worst happen. In short, what we had was no longer fit for purpose, calling for a fundamental re-think of our entire IT strategy.”
Thanks to Nutanix, sleepless nights worrying about IT are a thing of the past. Not only has our new infrastructure cut operating costs almost in half it’s also a lot more scalable, robust and easier to manage. That, in turn, gives us the confidence to press ahead with plans to enhance both the internal and external customer experience, safe in the knowledge that we have the right technologies and partners to make it all happen.
— Brian Roche, Director of Information Technology at Belfast City Airport
CHALLENGES
When Brian Roche was appointed Director of Information Technology at Belfast City Airport he was tasked with enhancing the airport’s IT services to cope with anticipated growth whilst, at the same time, reining in escalating costs. That, however, was to prove a far from simple task calling for the wholesale replacement of the existing IT infrastructure, a switch in operating model and the addition of much needed disaster recovery capabilities. And all without busting the budget.
“Not only was our existing 3-tier infrastructure coming to end of life, it lacked the scalability required to cope with expected growth,” he explains. “Our business agility was, similarly, limited by the existing managed service agreement, on top of which we were making do and with only basic backup facilities and were poorly equipped to cope should the worst happen. In short, what we had was no longer fit for purpose, calling for a fundamental re-think of our entire IT strategy.”
SOLUTION
With a wealth of industry experience to call on, it didn’t take long for Brian and his team to decide on a best fit approach based on migration to a hyperconverged infrastructure whilst also moving away from a managed service model to handling day to day operations in-house.
“We briefly considered migration to the Cloud,” he recalls, “but with fairly static data volumes the overheads were too great for it to make economic sense. Instead, we decided to stick with on-premise and use hyperconverged technology to deliver the same kind of scalability and ease of management on our own terms.”
A number of vendors were asked to tender for this new way of working. From these the Airport eventually chose Leaf IT which recommended two Nutanix Enterprise Cloud clusters to both meet performance, scalability and management requirements and deliver integrated data replication and disaster recovery capabilities.
Twice as much for half the price
Another reason for going with the Leaf IT/Nutanix quote was the ability to switch from its no-longer supported Microsoft Hyper-V software to the Nutanix AHV hypervisor, included at no extra cost as part of the standard Nutanix software stack.
“Most of the tenders were based around using VMware virtualisation,” commented Brian. “The Leaf IT/Nutanix bid, however, specified the no-cost AHV hypervisor, which meant we could equip both the primary cluster and the DR site for half the cost of just one datacentre using those alternatives.”
The tender also specified deployment in two separate airport locations with Leaf IT adding off-site data replication and third-line support as part of the deal, along with the use of Veeam encrypted backup for additional ransomware protection.
CUSTOMER OUTCOMES
Deployed at the height of Covid-19 restrictions the Nutanix installation was both swift and completed with no disruption to airport services. Indeed, the entire process took just two weeks including migration of some 16TB of data and 56 virtual workloads from old to new infrastructure, prior to switchover.
“We used Nutanix Move tools to automate most of the migration work which made it very easy,” explains Brian. “Moreover, Leaf IT agreed to move the first three VMs and document the processes required which meant we could handle the others ourselves, saving on cost and bringing the support team up to speed with Nutanix very quickly ready for the switchover.”
Faster, fewer, better, cheaper
Along with the clear performance improvements, to be expected from newer processors and all-flash storage, another immediate benefit was a massive reduction in rack space. Out went the full-to-bursting 42U rack in the main datacentre, to be replaced by a 4U unit plus a further 3U for rapid failover and load balancing at the second site. Added to which there have been huge benefits from bringing day to day management and support in-house rather than outsourcing that responsibility to a managed service provider.
“Thanks to the simple Prism Central management console anyone in the team can provision new VMs, processors and storage across both clusters and do that on demand,” explains Brian, “That not only makes us a lot more agile compared to using an MSP, it also saves on operational costs without impacting service levels. Plus, we can escalate more complex issues to Leaf IT and Nutanix specialists, both of which have proven to be very responsive. And, of course, we now have a full DR system which we didn’t have before, which means we can all sleep at night.
NEXT STEPS
Like everyone in the travel industry, Belfast City Airport was seriously impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. That, however, hasn’t stopped Brian and his team taking full advantage of the new Nutanix infrastructure to prepare for a full return to business-as-usual. Neither has it held back plans to enhance and add to the services available to customers and staff of the Airport’s 9 airlines plus 35 on-site business partners
Among those plans is the migration of the main Airport Operational Database (AODB) to the new infrastructure along with an Apache Spark data analytics rollout. In addition, members of the very busy support team are working on plans to deploy 5G across the Airport and create a secure VPN to support growing numbers of IoT devices which, in turn, will be used to automate baggage handling, passenger movements and other tasks across the site.
“We don’t need the capacity straight away,” he said. “However the big draw with Nutanix is the way it can be integrated with leading cloud platforms to seamlessly burst applications to the cloud when needed. A capability that is really compelling as a way of staying on top of both planned and unexpected surges in passenger and freight traffic and ramping up even faster as we come out of the pandemic.”
PARTNER
LEAF IT
A trusted Nutanix partner, Leaf-IT is a cloud first company helping businesses get better results with IT. Its team is dedicated to technology and harnessing cloud to achieve amazing success for clients such as Belfast City Airport and others across Ireland and the UK.