Nutanix Lets ec2i Focus On The Bigger Picture

Creative Production Agency Able To Concentrate On Running the Business Not the Infrastructure

Business Need

To cope with escalating demand for its technology-led creative production services, ec2i needed a simpler IT infrastructure to deliver the on-demand scalability and high availability those services require. An infrastructure which would allow the company to concentrate on developing these and other business critical systems, not just keeping the IT lights on.

Key Results

Challenge

At the start of its Nutanix journey, back in 2015, creative production company ec2i was like many small businesses, in that it had inadvertently become a victim of its own success. Demand for services was burgeoning but as a technology-led organisation it was finding it difficult to cope with that growth because of the limitations of a legacy IT infrastructure.

Not only were its physical servers, SAN storage and complex networks behind the business difficult to scale, they were also reaching end of life as well as becoming unreliable and hard to manage.

“We're a small company and don’t have the luxury of a dedicated expert hardware support team,” explains Managing Director Steve Fitzgerald. “We needed an infrastructure that would be simple and easy for non-experts to manage. An infrastructure that would enable us to concentrate on developing our business critical media production services to keep pace with escalating customer demand, rather than firefighting all the time.”

Solution

Fitzgerald and his team turned to specialist reseller ET Works for help. They recommended migration to a Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure and quickly organised a proof of concept trial to enable staff to see for themselves the benefits of the proposed solution.

The trial proved a success and the company quickly placed an order for a 4-node Nutanix Cloud Platform cluster to replace its 27 physical servers and SAN storage network. With help from ET Works this was installed, and the existing servers were quickly virtualised and consolidated to run on the AHV hypervisor included as part of the Nutanix software stack. Data held on the SAN was also migrated to the new infrastructure with all resources, physical and virtual, managed from a single Nutanix Prism console.

Following the initial migration, ec2i further opted to invest in a second Nutanix cluster which was installed at a separate disaster recovery site and configured to use the integrated data replication and recovery tools to maximise availability with instant failover should an issue arise.

Customer Outcome

As well saving massively on rack space, the new infrastructure has shown itself to be faster as well as cheaper to run. “We’re saving around £5,000/year just on power alone,” claims Fitzgerald, who is equally impressed by how much simpler it is to scale and manage.

“Rather than having to second guess what we might need and wait for servers and disks to be installed, new resources can be brought online in minutes,“ he explained. “More than that anyone in the team can manage the infrastructure while keeping it patched and up to date – a task which used to require a lot of time and effort – is now an almost trivial process. In fact I’d say the on-click upgrade tools are one of the most impressive features,” he adds.  

Thanks to the new infrastructure the company has been able to concentrate on its core business services. ec2i is a media production company specialising in creative retouching, colour management and the processing of large high-quality images/video for online channels as well as printed catalogues. Crucial to this is Renaissance, the company’s Software as a Service (SaaS) production management platform with integrated Production Management, Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Product Information Management (PIM) capabilities.

Another benefit showed itself when a few years later the deal for the original cluster expired with ec2i opting to upgrade rather than simply add more storage capacity due, again, to the pressure of continuing growth.

“It just made more sense as, rather than just adding more storage we got to increase storage and compute capacity at the same time, and it was a lot easier than it would have been,” Fitzgerald says. “New nodes were added to the existing cluster then old ones ‘removed’ one by one using Prism with the data automatically migrated. There was no downtime during the process and no need to switch over to the DR site. In fact, just like the Nutanix Cloud Platform as a whole, it just worked.”

Next Steps

With its scalable and easy to manage enterprise IT platform in place for over seven years, ec2i is looking to further enhance its Renaissance service portfolio. In particular by using the Nutanix Database Service to support the company’s DevOps environment which Fitzgerald hopes will address a number of issues relating to management of MySQL databases.

“At present we have to manually copy and move databases around, which can take hours” he explained. “But with the Nutanix Database Service we will be able to take regular snapshots and bring live databases back into our dev/test environment in just a few clicks. We’re always working on new features and changes, and this ability will be a real gamechanger, both when adding new features and troubleshooting issues in a timely fashion.”

Partner

ET Works

ET Works is a strategic Nutanix Cloud Champion for the EMEA region, offering independent IT solutions as a value-added reseller and managed services provider.