India’s Kanakia Group cuts capital and operating costs and boosts service levels with Nutanix Enterprise Cloud
Real estate
Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform
Kanakia Group has interests in commercial and residential property, education, hospitality and entertainment and is one of India’s largest real estate developers. With business pressures on its IT infrastructure rising rapidly, their IT department adopted Nutanix to boost scalability, eliminate the barriers to adopting new applications, and cut infrastructure management costs. The Head of IT, Chitranjan Kesari, says the Nutanix solution has delivered on all counts and is expected to trim the infrastructure cost of rolling out further software packages by more than a third.
We used to face tremendous problems with our in-house hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Recently we transferred its entire workload from the old infrastructure to the Nutanix infrastructure solution and we’re now saving lots of time in customer support, lead generation and follow-up, and on-site visits. One of the key business benefits of Nutanix AHV we have observed is the agility with which we are able to roll out our VMs. They used to take us 45 minutes to an hour. Currently, we are able to roll them out in less than 10 minutes, regardless of OS.
Mumbai-based Kanakia Group is one of India’s most recognised real estate developers. Its IT resources were not keeping up with the group’s exponential business growth, in large part because of their traditional three-tier architecture. Its processing, data access, storage and user interface were maintained as independent modules on separate platforms, requiring skilled server, storage and SAN switch experts to maintain them and keeping management costs high. The group’s infrastructure was also not readily scalable and it was becoming a bottleneck for application modernization.
Kanakia wasn’t ready, at least for the time being, to transition to the cloud. It was, however, interested in a “cloud-like” environment that would simplify management and cut IT costs. Its Information Technology Department looked to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) as the solution to its challenges. Proposals from a number of vendors were reviewed and in mid-2018 Kanakia opted to start small with a 3-node Nutanix setup with AHV as its hypervisor. According to Chitranjan, the Nutanix team did a good job of assessing the group’s environment and its business and technical requirements, and the new solution promised better manageability, agility and cost-effectiveness than the alternatives.
The project was smoothly implemented within three months. “From there we moved our major applications to Nutanix in phases and implemented the last phase in April 2019,” Chitranjan says. “Our entire suite of applications is now on Nutanix and all of them are running well.”
From huge outage problems to 99.99% uptime
According to Chitranjan, Kanakia Group’s traditional infrastructure setup had “very, very huge” system outages, sometimes caused by the storage network and in other cases by the SAN switches. “Nutanix has helped Kanakia to improve uptime from 95% to 99.9%, an amazing feat welcomed across the entire group,” he says.
Superb application performance impressed internal users and customers
From the end-user’s perspective, Chitranjan says, the benefits of Nutanix AHV are obvious in terms of application speed and availability
“Our attendance regularization application, which checks remote staff in and out, was time-consuming and cumbersome,” he explains. “It was a 15-minute process that Nutanix has cut down to a mere one to two minutes.” Similar performance gains were realised for users of the group’s Microsoft Dynamics CRM system who are now seeing substantial time savings.
IT is seen as a business-enabler
Internal stakeholders were also deeply impressed by the IT team’s ability to deploy business applications like the latest insurance mobile application on very short notice. “With Nutanix, applications needing IT resources on an ad-hoc basis can be added or removed on the fly depending on the business needs,” Chitranjan says.
Gained at least 40% opex savings, including manpower costs
With Nutanix’s enterprise cloud, Chitranjan projected that he would enjoy at last 40% opex cost savings due to datacentre footprint reduction, power and utilities bill, manpower cost savings, etc.
Moving away from the conventional architecture setup eliminated the cost of hiring various expensive specialist IT staff to maintain the different components of a legacy system, eg server, storage, SAN switch, etc. HCI together with the all-in-one-place simplicity of Prism management makes it effortless for any IT staff to pick up datacentre workflow process and maintenance.
Simplicity in workflow operations means higher productivity with a well-rested team
In fact, Nutanix enterprise cloud is so intuitive to manage that anyone can achieve results easily and in double-quick time as compared to their previous setup. Chitranjan highlighted a few key areas where he was duly impressed:
Staff released from long and tedious infrastructure maintenance can now efficiently divert their time to more business critical tasks such as supporting other business applications like CRM solution etc.
Chitranjan estimates that “at least 70% of my system administrator’s workload has been offloaded since Nutanix was implemented. Today, our system admin team can rest on Sundays and all public holidays without requiring them to return to work for system or VM upgrades like before.”
Chitranjan’s team has ambitious plans for artificial intelligence and robotics solutions to further move Kanakia Group into the digital realm. He expects these new offerings to all run on Nutanix.
One major near-term project is the rollout of an SAP S/4HANA ERP solution. It too will run on Nutanix and, based on Chitranjan’s experience with the efficiencies his team has experienced, he expects Nutanix AHV to reduce by approximately 35% the capital cost of the SAP deployment.