Clara Online Expands File Sharing Managed Service to Next-Generation IaaS Platform - Clara Cloud

Clara Online Enhances Customers’ Cloud Operations with Nutanix Operations Management Best Practices Developed In-House

INDUSTRY

Service Provider

CHALLENGES

• Operation and management burden due to increase in number of physical infrastructures in datacenters
• Frequent trips to the datacenter by staff in charge due to hardware failures
• Strengthen and expand datacenter services

SOLUTION

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

• AOS Storage
• AHV Hypervisor 

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

• Files Storage

BENEFITS

• Improved datacenter efficiency through a cumulative reduction of approximately 1,500 hardware units
• Improved service infrastructure availability and reduced operational burden by reducing points of failure
• Achievement of managed services by acquiring best practices in Nutanix utilization
  

CHALLENGES

Since its establishment in 1998, Clara Online, Inc. has been engaged in the cloud solution business to transform corporate IT infrastructure and the consulting business to support Japanese companies’ expansion into China, aiming to solve social issues under the mission of “making the way for the next era.

In order to meet a wide range of customer needs, including companies that are considering the use of public cloud services as their primary operating platform, and companies that want to create their own private cloud but do not want to own their own assets, the company provides IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) services for enterprise customers, and managed services for major clouds such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

In 2018, Clara Online’s IaaS service, Clara Cloud, will adopt Nutanix’s hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI). The new cloud service, based on the Nutanix Cloud Platform, is now available on subscription basis with an initial fee 0 Japanese yen.

In recent years, the number of customers using Clara Cloud have been steadily increasing, and Clara Online observed many customers rethinking their cloud strategy after full migration to public cloud. Trends in cloud usage seemed to have come full circle as customers who have gone fully public cloud weighed their options, and decides to return to private cloud or operate a hybrid of clouds which is best suited for their business needs. As such, customers are not only reviewing their infrastructure options but also their service infrastructure such as PaaS/SaaS. In 2022, Clara Online started to consider new services to further expand its existing IaaS offerings.

SOLUTION

When Clara Online launched its Nutanix-based IaaS service, there was an urgent need to drastically change the IT infrastructure of its datacenter service, the predecessor to Clara Cloud, and to reduce the number of hardware units to reduce operation and management man-hours. 

At the time, the datacenter had a large number of physical servers, and the total hardware including storage and network equipment amounted to several thousand units, which increased the time and cost of operation and management. “Our management issued a directive to half the number of physical servers within a year and to simplify the infrastructure. That was the impetus to introduce Nutanix,” recalled Tetsuro Honda, General Manager of the Cloud Solution Division. 

Currently, Clara Cloud is deployed in two main service delivery formats: provision of Nutanix clusters dedicated to customers, or provision of virtual machines running on Nutanix. Besides the HCI environment, Clara Cloud also provides initial setup, maintenance, operational management, system monitoring, fault detection, and reporting as part of its IaaS services, allowing its customers to use Nutanix as a cloud service in the shortest time possible.

In addition, the Clara Cloud Connect service enables a hybrid multi-cloud environment where data can be seamlessly exchanged by connecting to other clouds and datacenters. Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) Files Storage service has also been newly adopted to provide a secure cloud file-sharing service.

CUSTOMER OUTCOMES

Clara Online has successfully migrated data from its previous environment to Nutanix with minimal impact on customers using data center services, reducing 937 hardware units by the end of 2018. By further migrating to Nutanix, the cumulative number of hardware reductions reached approximately 1,500 units as of April 2022.

Motofumi Uno, Manager Tech Lead, Cloud Solution Division, said, “With Nutanix, the hardware reduction rate reached 93.3% as of the end of 2018, dramatically reducing the points of failure of our IT infrastructure. As a result, we have significantly increased the availability of our IT infrastructure while reducing operational and management man-hours, enabling us to offer highly available IaaS services to our customers at competitive rates.

” The migration of the IT infrastructure to Nutanix has brought many benefits to Clara Online besides the hardware savings. “The hardware reduction driven by Nutanix has allowed us to gain a great deal of Nutanix application know-how and knowledge of new services such as Files Storage. As a result, we were able to add value as IaaS services and acquire the skills to offer them as managed services, enhancing our Clara Cloud services in a way that directly benefits our customers,” said Honda.

NEXT STEPS

“Clara Cloud can modernize your IT infrastructure to a cloud-native infrastructure. Our services have also expanded to include secure cloud storage services that leverage Nutanix Unified storage. We are also looking forward to Nutanix's various features such as database services, container services, and network security to enhance the next generation of our cloud service offerings," said Honda about the company's future.