Faced with mounting operational constraints, Mutuelle des Douanes turned to Nutanix to build a robust, easy-to-manage environment that was perfectly suited to its resources. Ten years on, the hyperconverged infrastructure continues to deliver peace of mind, high performance, and seamless business continuity.
As a non-profit organization governed by Book III of the French Mutual Insurance Code, Mutuelle des Douanes supports active and retired French customs officers and their families through a wide range of social assistance programs and solidarity initiatives. With a team of around ten employees based in Saint-Denis, the organization relies on a network of 44 regional committees across the country to ensure close engagement with members and consistent service delivery.
8 nodes distributed across two data centers (Saint-Denis / Pantin)
60 TB per site, for a total of 120 TB across both sites
40 virtualized VDI workstations
Two network operators ensuring WAN redundancy
Zero data loss in ten years of operation
40% reduction in manual interventions thanks to proactive monitoring
With Nutanix, I was able to secure our infrastructure while retaining full control. The goal was not to do more, but to do better, more simply. The infrastructure is running smoothly, backups are reliable, and users are no longer complaining. This is what I call a quiet success.
When Philippe Vitry took over as Chief Information Officer at Mutuelle des Douanes, his goal was to set up a dedicated, secure infrastructure. There were two major challenges: securing the infrastructure and ensuring business continuity. Building on his experience at Mgéfi, he undertook a comprehensive overhaul of the infrastructure with the aim of streamlining management, enhancing resilience, and ensuring the security of member data. Nutanix emerged as the solution best suited to the size and ambitions of Mutuelle des Douanes.
Mutuelle des Douanes needed to modernize its IT system while keeping control of its human and financial resources. With a single CIO and a small team, administration needed to be centralized and predictable, without excessive reliance on external providers. The legacy heterogenous environments required a great deal of manual intervention and presented a constant risk of service disruption. The IT department was therefore looking for an infrastructure capable of ensuring stability, ease of operation, and business continuity, even in the event of a disaster.
Following a thorough benchmark comparing several vendors and infrastructure approaches, Nutanix emerged as the most robust and coherent solution to meet the needs of Mutuelle des Douanes. Beyond performance, it was the ease of operation, enhanced platform stability, and quality of support that convinced the IT department.
Choosing Nutanix met three priorities: consolidating environments, ensuring business continuity, and providing centralized administration suited to a small team. The chosen architecture relies on two identical infrastructures deployed at the Saint-Denis and Pantin sites. Linked by a redundant 10Gb/s WAN network, the two sites operate in a mirrored setup to ensure high availability for critical services and resilience against physical incidents.
Centralized administration through Prism Central enables oversight of the entire IT system from a single pane of glass. This unified management covers monitoring, updates, maintenance, and activity reports, while automating a large part of operations. Benefits were immediate, with a 30% reduction in alerts and a significant simplification of the operational workload.
The native compatibility with Veeam for backups and Trend Micro for endpoint and server protection made it easier to integrate security and business continuity, without any production disruption. Backed by this homogeneous architecture, the IT department retains complete control over operations while benefiting from a scalable and sustainable technological foundation capable of supporting the future developments of Mutuelle des Douanes.
The process involved several stages, from building the entire initial environment to duplicating critical services at the second site. The eight Lenovo nodes provide an optimal balance of performance, cost, and scalability, while ensuring a fully redundant infrastructure. Data is continuously replicated between the two data centers, with immutable copies and a secondary set stored in an external secure vault in Paris. The network, jointly managed by two providers, ensures service continuity even in the event of a link failure, keeping business applications available at all times. “We carried out the project without disrupting users or business operations. The transition was smooth, and everything restarted immediately. This proved that the architecture we put in place is solid and well-designed,” explains Philippe Vitry, CIO and DPO at Mutuelle des Douanes.
The combined monitoring of Prism Central and ServiceNav provides full visibility into resources and performance. It enables the team to anticipate needs, prevent incidents, and optimize workload distribution. Since its implementation, the IT department has seen a 40% reduction in manual interventions related to monitoring or preventive reboots. With this modernization, Mutuelle des Douanes now has a stable, resilient IT environment that is fully aligned with its business continuity strategy.
Ten years after the implementation, the Nutanix infrastructure has become a true pillar of reliability. Application performance has significantly improved: business-critical applications now launch almost instantly, and the 40 VDI workstations enjoy a smooth experience equivalent to that of a local workstation. No data loss has been recorded since deployment, despite several power or hardware incidents. Maintenance operations, such as disk replacement, are performed without downtime. The CIO also highlights the clarity of Prism Central, which makes budget planning and capacity forecasting easier. The infrastructure has become a true driver of trust — stable, predictable, and fully controlled.
The next phase involves migrating the environment to the Nutanix AHV hypervisor, in order to eliminate VMware licensing costs and further enhance technological consistency.
Mutuelle des Douanes also plans to adopt an EDR/XDR solution to enhance threat detection and further leverage Prism Central's analytical capabilities to anticipate storage and compute needs. Beyond the technical considerations, the resulting stability directly contributes to Mutuelle des Douanes' social mission, which is to guarantee its members' access to services at key moments in their lives.