Less complexity, lower costs, faster innovation: DuMont Media Group is transforming its IT with Nutanix to meet the challenges of the digital media world.
Traditional IT infrastructure concepts did not provide DuMont with the flexibility and speed to implement digital business models. That's why the media company decided to make a fresh start with the Nutanix HCI platform. It dramatically simplifies IT operations, reduces operational expenses, and accelerates new project deployments — even in hybrid cloud scenarios.
60 percent less operating effort
The IT team now spends significantly less time on infrastructure administration and can focus more on strategic IT development.
30 percent lower virtualization costs
DuMont realized significant savings by switching its virtualization platform from VMware ESXi to Nutanix AHV. This frees up more resources for new projects.
Seamless extension of the IT environment into the cloud
DuMont has the flexibility to extend its infrastructure to the cloud as needed. A hybrid disaster recovery solution has already been successfully implemented with Nutanix.
We wanted to build a modern, efficient, scalable, and cost-transparent IT infrastructure that would work both in our own data center and in the cloud. With Nutanix, we have been able to do just that and make our entire infrastructure stack cloud-ready. That's why we would choose this platform again any time.
The DuMont Media Group is one of Germany's oldest media companies and describes itself as a "start-up with over 400 years of tradition." The family-owned company combines the familiarity of a strong, established brand with the innovative spirit of a start-up. 2,000 employees turn information into social and economic progress — every day.
With its three business units — Regional Media, Business Information, and Marketing Technology — DuMont is on a digital growth path. DuMont Book Publishing is one of Germany's most successful book publishers, with a program that includes literature, non-fiction, and illustrated non-fiction. In all of these areas, the company develops innovative solutions for the communications landscape of the future.
The digital transformation of the media world is also creating new challenges for IT leaders at DuMont. "Traditional infrastructure concepts do not provide the flexibility and speed to deliver new services and business models," said Jörg Bartke, Chief Architect at DuMont subsidiary Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger Medien. "As a result, we began adopting a software-centric approach several years ago to reduce the footprint and complexity of our environment and make our operations more efficient. In the future, we want to run a standardized technology stack flexibly across environments on-premises and in the cloud so that we are able to respond quickly to new business needs."
Specifically, this meant moving away from complex three-tier architectures that required a lot of administration and were difficult to scale as performance requirements increased. DuMont wanted to fundamentally modernize its on-premises infrastructure and greatly simplify and automate operations. At the same time, they wanted to be able to scale their IT as modularly and cost transparently as possible, including moving in the direction of the public cloud.
IT leaders at DuMont therefore chose Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure to transform their IT. "The Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure provides a fully integrated architectural stack that frees us from many operational tasks," said Jörg Bartke. "We moved away from the cumbersome management of individual silos and instead can deploy and manage the resources we need with just a few clicks." The convergence of computing, storage, networking, and virtualization technologies on a single platform not only makes our IT leaner, but it makes it also easier to consume."
Together with Nutanix and Nutanix partner SVA, DuMont developed a roadmap for future-proofing its IT. From the beginning, the new strategy was called "DuMont goes Hybrid Data Center." The first step on the path to the cloud was to modernize the on-premises infrastructure.
The project team deployed the first Nutanix clusters in the Cologne, Germany, data center as a replacement for the existing three-tier architecture. All virtual workloads were migrated from VMware ESXi to the Nutanix AHV hypervisor. At the same time, DuMont simplified its system landscape, reducing the number of virtual machines deployed from 1100 to 600.
DuMont's Nutanix infrastructure meanwhile consists of several clusters with a total of 16 nodes, which are operated in two mirrored server rooms in Cologne. Among other things, the HCI infrastructure runs an SAP system that is critical to the company's core internal processes and, for this reason, must be available around the clock.
IT Team Saves Time and Effort Through Simplified Operations
By moving to the Nutanix platform, the DuMont IT team has to spend much less time on infrastructure administration. Updates can now be automatically installed across the entire environment with a single click. As performance requirements increase, additional nodes can be added on the fly without the need for any system architecture changes.
Jörg Bartke estimates that operating efforts have been reduced by at least 60 percent. "In the past, we needed three different storage and networking specialists for each customization. With Nutanix, we no longer have to worry about many of these issues and therefore are less dependent on individual skills. At the same time, this frees up more time and resources for strategic digitization projects."
Switching from VMware to AHV Reduces Virtualization Costs
Implementing the Nutanix platform also quickly paid off economically: "Just by migrating from VMware ESXi to Nutanix AHV, we were able to reduce our server virtualization costs by at least 30 percent," Jörg Bartke reports. "Since AHV is the default hypervisor that comes with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, we don't have to purchase licenses for a virtualization solution. The cost advantage over VMware even may increase in the future due to the changed licensing and pricing policies of VMware's new owner, Broadcom."
DuMont is also realizing savings due to the smaller footprint of the new infrastructure. Compared to the previous 3-tier architecture, the compact Nutanix clusters require significantly less rack space in the data center. Power consumption for operating and cooling the systems has also been significantly reduced.
Hybrid Disaster Recovery Solution Ensures Business Continuity
The media company meanwhile has also extended its Nutanix infrastructure to a colocation provider and established a disaster recovery environment in an Equinix data center. With the Nutanix disaster recovery solution, data from the various clusters is continuously replicated to this remote location. In the event of a disaster, such as a complete failure of the Cologne data center, the IT team would be able to restart the systems there on a priority basis. Nutanix tools orchestrate the recovery process to ensure business operations can be quickly restored.
"We have already designed the contingency scenario, conducted disaster recovery tests with our partner SVA, and are about to go live." Jörg Bartke is very pleased. "As a result, we are considering running active Nutanix clusters at Equinix in the future to reduce the load on our on-premises infrastructure. This would be the next step in our journey to the hybrid cloud."
Further additions to the Nutanix platform are planned in the coming months: DuMont plans to implement the Nutanix Database Service to simplify the administration of its extensive Microsoft SQL Server environment. The solution enables the IT team to automate tasks such as provisioning, scaling, and updating SQL servers, and to manage all instances from a single console. "We are expecting Nutanix Database Service to enable faster database provisioning, easier patch management, and flexibly scalable performance," concludes Jörg Bartke. "With that, Nutanix will help us reduce management effort and increase IT agility in this area as well."
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Date: 10/24