INDUSTRY
High Technology
SOLUTION
- Nutanix AHV
- Nutanix AOS
- Nutanix Files
- Nutanix Prism Pro
CHALLENGES
To compete with IT hosting giants, Serit Tromsø aims to build close relationships with the companies it serves across northern Norway. So that its employees have the time to provide the personal touch to clients, the company is always looking for ways to minimize management and maintenance workloads. Serit Tromsø set out to find an easy-to-administer computing platform that could deliver the performance and availability its clients demand, all while protecting the company's profit margins.
BUSINESS BENEFITS
Using Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure, Serit Tromsø dramatically decreased the administrative burden on its employees. The company is using these time savings to elevate service levels for clients and to enable competitive pricing. At the same time, Serit Tromsø supports clients' businesses with 24/7 availability and dramatic reductions in response times.
Nutanix technology saves us hours on management and maintenance each week. We don't have to keep track of complex licensing anymore either. Nutanix Prism includes all the features we need for day-to-day management of our hosting platform. These efficiencies help us to protect our profit margins, so we can offer competitive fees to clients.
—Stig Mathiassen, Data Center Team Leader, Serit Tromsø
CHALLENGE
Serit Tromsø is a privately owned IT company with a presence in Northern Norway. The company is committed to supporting enterprises based in the region and beyond with IT consultancy, innovation, and hosting services that enable competitive advantage.
To challenge IT hosting giants, Serit Tromsø must combine its personal touch with attributes that clients have come to expect: high availability, consistent performance, and reasonable prices. The company recognized that its previous IT infrastructure was failing to live up to the task.
"Our differentiator is that we provide a localized service," said Stig Mathiassen, Data Center Team Leader at Serit Tromsø. "But our clients still need cost-effective, stable and flexible IT services to support their businesses. We identified our IT infrastructure as an obstacle to this goal."
The issue? The Serit Tromsø team was spending too much time addressing performance issues and restoring client environments after outages. After a period of unplanned downtime, the company began looking for an alternative to ensure it could continue to meet service level agreements (SLAs).
SOLUTION
To support first-class IT hosting services, Serit Tromsø chose to deploy Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) from Nutanix, featuring Dell EMC nodes. The computing cluster is managed with Nutanix Prism Pro and virtualized with Nutanix AHV.
"We selected Nutanix HCI after lots of research, testing and reviews of analyst reports," recalled Mathiassen. "The Nutanix proposal ticked every box for us: simple management, high resilience and compelling price-performance. We opted for Nutanix AHV over competing hypervisors because the licensing model is so much simpler, and it's proved incredibly easy to use."
Helped by distributor Exclusive Networks, Serit Tromsø procured and deployed the new infrastructure over a couple of days. Using Nutanix Move, the company was able to migrate all client virtual machines (VMs) to Nutanix AHV without a hitch.
"The Nutanix Move agent is simply marvelous," commented Mathiassen. "It allowed us to achieve a rapid, low-risk migration to the Nutanix platform for all but one VM. It also makes onboarding new clients easier than ever."
CUSTOMER OUTCOME
Using Nutanix Prism Pro to manage client environments, the Serit Tromsø team has unlocked huge time savings. The company has eliminated overnight maintenance windows, instead carrying out updates and optimizations without taking systems offline.
"Nutanix technology saves us hours on management and maintenance each week," said Mathiassen. "We don't have to keep track of complex licensing anymore either. Nutanix Prism includes all the features we need for day-to-day management of our hosting platform. These efficiencies help us to protect our profit margins, so we can offer competitive fees to clients."
Serit Tromsø's clients have seen significant performance improvements, contributing to their competitive edge and helping to inspire ongoing loyalty. Since deploying the Nutanix solution, the company has experienced no issues with availability.
"We've seen reductions in disk response times across the board – even for our clients' most demanding applications," commented Mathiassen. "For example, one of our biggest clients, a leading finance organization, saw database disk response times drop from 100 ms to just 3 ms, and they're thrilled. Another company has seen almost all delays to its accounting system disappear, to their delight."
NEXT STEPS
Serit Tromsø has already purchased Nutanix Files, a software-defined, scale-out storage solution, to extend its Nutanix HCI environment. The company is also considering connecting the environment to the public cloud.
"The straightforward scalability of Nutanix technology is a key advantage," concluded Mathiassen. "It allows us to act fast to seize growth opportunities, confident that we can scale our infrastructure to meet new demand. Another benefit is in-built cloud integration, enabling us to explore offering hybrid cloud services. By helping us to step up the level of service we deliver to clients, Nutanix technology gives us the tools to succeed in the marketplace."