Hyperconverged infrastructure improves stability and application performance
Education
Applications
Groupe Média TFO is a public media organization created by the government of Ontario, Canada. The company produces and distributes French language educational programming, using its network as a springboard to develop content. When its hardware based storage and compute devices began to show their age, the organization migrated its operations to Nutanix Enterprise Cloud for improved visibility and consistent performance.
Nutanix lets me see all the data in our environment, and provides insight into infrastructure health, events, and alerts. I’m able to react fast and get issues resolved easily without needing to dig deeper.
Groupe Média TFO makes its content available on a variety of platforms, including its own television channel and a variety of YouTube channels. Through its three offices, the organization serves two million students and 30,000 teachers via its web sites, mobile applications, and subscription and social media offerings. To receive, process, and distribute media across all its channels and platforms, Groupe Média relies on its network infrastructure. “Our network is a major channel in terms of how production is done,” said Le Pichon. “We use a variety of multimedia applications, which can be very memory and CPU-intensive.”
Without fast, dependable infrastructure operations, the organization’s productivity would plunge. As its network neared end of life and performance began to be less consistent, the IT team began exploring alternative solutions, including a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) approach. “Our existing legacy infrastructure was getting old, so we were ready for a change,” said Le Pichon. “Moving to a new HCI model seemed risky, but we were willing to take the chance.”
After considering a variety of solutions, Groupe Média chose Nutanix Enterprise Cloud to support its new environment. “We were very happy and surprised by the performance delivered during the proof of concept (POC),” said Le Pichon. “That’s why we chose Nutanix. We were impressed by its unified management dashboard, simple upgrades, and all the features it provided to manage, plan, and use the infrastructure.”
Groupe Média migrated its separate storage and compute environments and applications to the new solution, dramatically simplifying its architecture and reducing its footprint. “We went from three racks of server and storage equipment to a single rack, for a much smaller footprint,” said Aladin Munyanziza, IT Infrastructure Specialist at Groupe Média.
The IT team was also pleased by the knowledgeable service that Nutanix provided from day zero. “When we did the POCs, we were very happy with the support we had with Nutanix, compared to the competitor,” said Le Pichon. “We made few calls during the process, and the experience was amazing.”
Groupe Média migrated all of its key applications and services, including the Louise Media Management System, Microsoft SQL, Oracle databases, and customized multimedia applications to the unified Nutanix solution. Since then, performance on the organization’s most important enterprise and production applications has been consistent and nimble. “Nobody has complained about sluggish applications,” said Munyanziza. “We can also see that performance and latency have been excellent when we review the Nutanix Prism Management dashboard. I am very happy with the cluster-wide controller latency, which is down to 1.96 ms.”
With its previous environment, Groupe Média’s IT team had to use separate monitoring and management tools for storage management, infrastructure management, and administration of its VMware environment. Nutanix lets the group consolidate both the storage and operational dashboards under Nutanix Prism for a single pane of glass view. “The consolidated solution provides some cost savings, and also better operational insight, which makes my work easier because I can see a lot of information,” said Munyanziza. “Another feature I like is data protection. I’m able to take snapshots of virtual machines (VMs) that I can restore, in the event anything happens to the VM in production.”
With its scalable, flexible Nutanix environment in place, Groupe Média is beginning to evaluate how it might take advantage of additional features such as the AHV hypervisor. “We are having internal conversations about AHV, which could provide some efficiencies within our environment.”