Founded in 1992, Nexxera is the leading provider of business-to-business payment services in Brazil. Companies across all sectors use Hubly—Nexxera’s one-stop solution for finance and business management—to co-ordinate supply chains, process invoices, and handle payments. As well as providing payment processing services, the company also offers Nexxera Credit: a smart credit management platform that enables business to ensure suppliers are paid on time, every time.
Nexxera’s aging three-tier architecture was unable to support future growth and meet its evolving security needs. Nexxera teamed up with business partner Safesystem, which recommended a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution from Nutanix, pre-integrated and running on the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX platform. The combined solution has helped Nexxera reduce operational IT costs, and apply micro-segmentation to strengthen security and compliance.
| Reduced costs | Improved IT efficiency | Maximum availability |
|---|---|---|
| 20% reduction in data center footprint cuts energy consumption costs | 16% efficiency increase frees IT personnel from time-consuming management tasks | Strengthens business continuity with instant failover capabilities |
The Nutanix AHV hypervisor helps us to avoid vendor lock-in and offers native integration with public cloud solutions, opening up the possibility for us to explore hybrid cloud and multi-cloud solutions in the future. Together with the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series, the solution helps us simplify and streamline our IT architecture and reduce the management burden.
Nexxera processes over 7 billion transactions each year, and payment volumes are only expected to increase as more companies move to digitize and automate key finance processes. To meet growing demand for services and deliver consistently excellent service, it’s vital that the IT infrastructure supporting Nexxera’s operations is scalable, secure, highly reliable, and performant.
For many years, Nexxera relied on a traditional three-tier IT infrastructure comprising 25 blade servers and 12 storage nodes to run its mission-critical business applications. While this approach enabled the company to provide industry-leading payment and electronic data interchange (EDI) services, it offered limited scalability, required extensive IT maintenance, and generated significant costs for the business.
While Nexxera’s existing infrastructure was highly secure, the company’s firewall was only able to monitor north-south traffic: information flowing in or out of the data center from external sources. To fortify system security and drive smarter infrastructure management, Nexxera wanted to monitor traffic within its data center too.
“With transaction volumes soaring, we knew that our current IT systems and processes would not be able to support future growth. We took this opportunity to transform our data center—targeting greater scalability and lower costs, as well as enhanced security and data monitoring features,” said Thiago Garcia, Director of IT Infrastructure at Nexxera.
To eliminate complexity and drive more efficient IT system management, Nexxera replaced its legacy infrastructure with a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) from Nutanix and Lenovo.
Nutanix AHV Virtualization offers a secure, enterprise-grade virtualization solution that helps the organization streamline operations. Pre-integrated on the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX platform, it resides on two four-node clusters at separate sites in an active/active configuration for synchronous data replication. The combined solution simplifies infrastructure management while offering easy flexibility and scalability.
“The Lenovo appliances provide tremendous flexibility, excellent performance, and rock-solid reliability,” said Garcia. “And with Nutanix hyperconvergence software pre-loaded, we felt confident that the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX solutions would help us to build a much more resilient and future-proof data center.”
To achieve a rapid implementation and boost system security, Nexxera teamed up with business partner Safesystem, which helped the company to leverage micro-segmentation using Nutanix AHV to create distinct logical partitions for each of its core applications.
“Safesystem went the extra mile to help us establish two brand-new data centers quickly, enabling us to minimize business disruption during the implementation,” said Garcia.
With the HCI from Nutanix and Lenovo, Nexxera has reduced operational IT costs, and is much better positioned to expand its services and grow its payment network.
“Moving to Nutanix running on the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX platform has massively reduced our data center footprint and associated energy consumption—we’ve gone from 25 servers to just eight appliances,” says Garcia. “This translates into significant cost savings and reduced IT maintenance workload, freeing more time and resources for IT staff to focus on innovation.”
By harnessing the power of micro-segmentation and hyperconvergence, Nexxera has gained much greater visibility into data center traffic. “Unlike our legacy infrastructure, we now have a clear view of all east-west traffic, not just north-south,” said Garcia. “This means that we can monitor our systems much more closely and prevent any unwanted traffic within our data center. What’s more, synchronous data replication between the two sites means we can rapidly fail over in the event of unplanned downtime, helping us to ensure uninterrupted service for our customers.”
“With a high-performance, reliable, and scalable HCI underpinning operations, we can deliver excellent service to our customers around the clock,” said Garcia.
With its new HCI infrastructure in place, Nexxera has put a scalable foundation in place to meet new business needs for years to come.
“With HCI from Nutanix and Lenovo, we can run much more lean, efficient, and productive IT operations, releasing resources for us to invest in growth and innovation,” said Garcia.