Headquartered in Toulouse, France, Equadex is a fast-growing IT and telecoms solutions provider, with services including consulting, outsourcing, networking, infrastructure, cloud hosting and software development. The company is laser-focused on unlocking the business benefits of technology for its 450+ customers, drawing on a philosophy that IT should be a solution for growth rather than a cost center. Particularly for small and mid-sized organizations, keeping up with the trends in information technology can feel like an insurmountable problem.
In partnership with leading global vendors like Nutanix, Equadex aims to "humanize" technology, bringing it within easy reach of all organizations.
| Streamlined management | Enhanced agility | Intelligent efficiency |
|---|---|---|
| 100 hours saved annually in server administration | Faster scalability at lower incremental cost | State-of-the-art infrastructure backed by business-aware services |
The Lenovo and Nutanix hyperconverged solution gives us a scalable, flexible platform that will enable us to keep expanding our services and customer base.
Equadex works with clients across a wide range of industries, offering business solutions for a broad variety of challenges. To support the diverse requirements of this growing set of clients, the company constantly seeks to make its own infrastructure as flexible and adaptable as possible.
As Equadex planned the creation of a second data center, the company reviewed its existing practices to see whether a hyperconverged infrastructure would be appropriate.
“As we continue to grow rapidly, we're always looking for ways to be more efficient and agile,” explained Franck Marty, Managing Director at Equadex. “We have our own virtualized infrastructure, plus we host and manage numerous virtualized environments for our clients. Hyperconvergence promised both to reduce our administrative overheads and to simplify future scalability.”
After considering a variety of solutions, Equadex chose Nutanix as its hyperconvergence vendor, running on Lenovo appliances. “The Lenovo ThinkAgile HX appliances are tailor made for the Nutanix Cloud Platform,” said Marty. “When we need to update Nutanix, we save dozens of hours because Lenovo and Nutanix together certify that the update will work with all of our server components.”
Equadex performed a proof-of-concept exercise for Nutanix Cloud Platform, including tests on specialty solutions such as GPU-enabled servers. Having confirmed that the combination of Lenovo hardware and Nutanix software would meet the current and future needs of its clients, Equadex deployed a cluster of three Lenovo ThinkAgile HX2320 Appliances in its new data center and migrated around 20 existing hosted client environments. The company also created a duplicate infrastructure in its original data center, with cross-site backups to create a geo-resilient disaster-recovery option.
“The hyperconverged technology from Nutanix and Lenovo makes it affordable for practically any size of organization to enjoy the advantages of enterprise-class technology,” said Marty.
Results
The Nutanix and Lenovo hyperconverged solution gives Equadex clients a fast, stable, secure and highly flexible platform for running their business-critical virtualized systems. As the hosted landscape grows, Equadex will be able to rapidly and non-disruptively expand the hyperconverged infrastructure through small incremental investments. "For small environments, hyperconvergence is perhaps more costly than traditional virtualization, but the cost advantages increase rapidly as the environments get bigger," says Franck Marty. "Operational costs are also significantly lower: we estimate that we're already saving around 100 hours annually in server administration—time which can be reinvested in helping clients."
Thanks to Nutanix and Lenovo, and to its own economies of scale, Equadex can offer its clients a level of redundancy and performance that would be prohibitively expensive for most of them to achieve independently.
With its combined hyperconverged solution in place, Equadex has achieved not only the business agility it needs, but the scalability to continue to support changing needs well into the future.