COGEP expands with Nutanix

A multidisciplinary consulting, auditing, and accounting firm, COGEP has developed financial, legal, social, and specialized expertise to provide comprehensive support to companies and entrepreneurs. Today, it is the 10th leading firm in France, and has a turnover of more than 100 million Euros. Over the past few years, the group has grown considerably: from 250 employees in 2004 to 1600 in 2020, with a particularly marked acceleration in recruitment over the last two years. In addition to its 110 offices throughout France, the firm is also an international player through the HLB International network, which operates on all five continents.

INDUSTRY

Accounting services

CHALLENGES

• Scaling up
• Accommodate the rapid growth of the Group

SOLUTION

• Acropolis (AOS)
• Prism

BENEFITS

• Easy administration
• Resilience of the infrastructure
• Efficient and very reactive support

BACKGROUND

Faced with such a development, which was achieved mainly through external growth, the company needed to have a very flexible IT system in order to quickly integrate the assets of acquired firms. The company therefore adopted virtualized storage at an early stage to gain flexibility. Hosted at the company’s headquarters in Saint Doulchard, near Bourges (France), the infrastructure was based on two clusters in active/active mode in two remote rooms. But in 2015, the infrastructure was reaching saturation point.

At that time, COGEP hesitated between keeping the same solution, but with more capacity, or switching to something completely new. After benchmarking the solutions on the market, they ultimately opted for the simplicity of hyperconvergence with Nutanix. “ Our architecture remained very decentralized,” said Mathieu Caraty, Infrastructure and Security Manager at COGEP. “Each site of the group had its own servers with a few central applications. But we already knew at the time that we wanted to move towards greater centralization. So we needed a solution that could easily scale up to support this development and our growth .”

THE SOLUTION

At the time, Nutanix was also the only hyperconverged solution capable of properly managing the hypervisor chosen by the group (Hyper-V). So in 2015, COGEP replaced its legacy system with two three-node Nutanix clusters in active/active mode, and acquired a third three-node cluster for a disaster recovery implementation. After migrating its 50 VMs, the firm then began its centralization effort, starting with payroll software.

In 2018, the firm continued its project with the deployment of a farm accounting software. On this occasion, they purchased four new Nutanix nodes. During this process, they also dropped their disaster recovery plan and redistributed the nodes they had purchased in 2015 to their production clusters. “ We switched to two clusters of 7 and 6 nodes, as the DRP idea was abandoned in part because of the move of our IT system,” explained Mathieu Caraty. “The network coverage in Saint Doulchard is limited, and if we wanted to have electrical redundancy, high bandwidth, and high availability, we would have had to invest heavily. Instead, we chose to move our IT system to Equinix’s data centers, as the guarantees provided by the operator made the DRP unnecessary.”

WHAT ABOUT THE FUTURE?

In 2020, COGEP further upgraded its existing infrastructure, replacing its 2015 nodes that had reached the end of their support life with new Nutanix nodes. Today, the firm has about 150 VMs, and the migration that began in September is expected to be complete by the end of the year. After acquiring a new practice in Marseille, COGEP also switched hypervisors, but not infrastructure solutions. “ At each major milestone, we challenged the Nutanix choice, and each time, we re-signed for another round. In fact, even today, when we are no longer constrained by our hypervisor, Nutanix remains the easiest to administer and the most resilient solution, with very responsive support that stays by your side until the problem is successfully resolved ,” said Mathieu Caraty. And there is one more reason: AHV is about to cover the needs of COGEP’s extended clusters, and the firm may well switch hypervisors once again to Nutanix to gain simplicity and save some money in the process.

A WORD FROM THE PROVIDER

“ COGEP’s IT system has undergone many strategic changes over the last five years: outsourcing, change of hypervisor, and disaster recovery plan. Nutanix was able to make their infrastructure invisible, and provide relevant answers to all the constraints raised by these changes.

“ Franck Lavroff, IT business manager, Orange Business Services