From Timeshares to Terabytes: Westgate Resorts Transforms into a Mecca for IT Modernization

The guest experience is everything in hospitality. From the moment patrons book a room to the final farewell, every interaction is an opportunity to create something memorable.

But behind the scenes, the IT infrastructure that powers those experiences are often invisible—and when they begin to falter, the impact can be felt everywhere.

For Westgate Resorts, a company known for its family-friendly timeshares, idyllic rental properties and entertainment venues, the stakes were especially high.

Across its 60 resorts, more than 9,000 employees and thousands more guests rely on Westgate’s internally developed application to manage services and amenities, reservations, room inventory, financing, contracts, mortgages, and more.

“That application is our lifeline,” said Angel Miranda, CIO at Westgate Resorts, headquartered in Orlando, Fla. “If it goes down, business stops.”

By 2023, that lifeline was under strain. Its legacy database environment was aging, backups took up to 18 hours and disaster recovery was unreliable. Worse, a database licensing audit revealed that costs had ballooned by $2 million.

“We were over-provisioned and over-licensed,” Miranda said. “It wasn’t sustainable.”

Westgate Resorts needed a change. But it needed more than a modern IT infrastructure—it needed a new way of thinking.

Key Results

The Challenge: A Legacy System at Risk

The legacy IT infrastructure at Westgate Resorts was buckling under pressure and old age.

Disaster recovery was a challenge. Backups needed five engineers to work weekends. Backups, cloning and refreshes took 18 hours. And the resort’s database licensing model—tied to compute and storage—was penalizing them for scaling.

“We had a three-month window to migrate,” Miranda said. “If we missed it, we’d have to wait another year. That would’ve meant more financial strain and operational inefficiencies.”

Westgate explored several options and considered wide range of database-as-a-service platforms to simplify and automate database lifecycle management across on-premises and hybrid cloud environments with minimal operational overhead.

One solution stood out: Nutanix Database Service.

The Turning Point: Transparency that Builds Trust

Miranda was initially skeptical. But a visit to Nutanix headquarters in California changed everything.

“There was no sales pitch,” he said. “Working with Nutanix is more like a business partnership.”

Nutanix officials white-boarded several practical solutions, answered tough questions and gave Westgate full access to engineers and developers who built the product.

“We were able to ask Nutanix engineers and developers tough questions that most customers never have the opportunity to ask,” Miranda recalled. “And I liked the approach to consolidate storage, compute and networking into a single platform.”

“The simplicity of the Nutanix platform is quite amazing,” added Westgate Systems Manager Bladimir Gonzalez. “Nutanix makes infrastructure management so much easier.”

That transparency on the part of Nutanix built trust. And with House of Brick—a trusted database migration partner—Westgate Resorts made the leap.

The Migration: Seamless, Swift and Silent

The migration was a masterclass in precision. Westgate moved its lifeline application to the Nutanix Database Services platform in just four hours.

“After we made the switch to Nutanix, no one called the next day,” recalled Gonzalez. “That’s how we know it worked. Everything happened seamlessly and transparently.”

The results were impressive:

• Total cost of ownership reduced by $1.6 million a year.

• Patching cycles decreased from 12 hours to 90 minutes.

• Backup, cloning and refresh times went from 18 hours to one hour.

“The total cost of ownership with Nutanix Database Service will save us around $1.6 million a year,” said Miranda.

Mehul Shah, Senior Manager of Database Services at Westgate, added that the company was able to reduce the number of CPUs it had relied on from 24 to 16.

“This is huge—Nutanix gives us the same great performance with fewer CPUs, which lowered our CPU cost by 30%,” Shah explained.

Empowering People, Not Just Systems

The technical wins were impressive. But the human impact was even greater.

“The transition to Nutanix Database Service has reduced stress and definitely improved our work/life balance,” said Shah. “Backups used to require multiple engineers working weekends. Now we do it in hours—and we get our weekends back.”

And for Miranda, the success of the migration was more than operational—it was personal. Shortly after, he was named full-time CIO. “That was a defining moment,” he said. “It showed what our team could do.”

What’s Next: AI, Kubernetes, and the Future of Hospitality

With Nutanix NDB as its foundation, Westgate is already looking ahead to:

• Expand its Kubernetes® infrastructure to support containerized workloads.

• Use AI to streamline customer service and qualify timeshare leads.

• Protect CCTV data across its resorts with efficient storage and stronger security.

“Our partnership with Nutanix has been instrumental in helping Westgate succeed,” said Miranda. “We’ll continue to leverage that relationship—not just to keep up but to drive innovation.”

Westgate’s journey with Nutanix serves as a blueprint for infrastructure modernization. It shows what’s possible when technology aligns with trust, and how modern infrastructure can drive a welcoming guest experience and business success.

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