Kunvarji Group’s deployment boosts performance, shreds operating costs, cuts maintenance overhead and has internal customers amazed at its speed.
Finance
Kunvarji Group’s IT department is now better equipped to support the group’s business as Nutanix helps speed up the go to market experience with faster rollout of applications and flexible scaling.
We were looking for a setup which can be flexible enough to adapt to the changes and enhancements but avoid the limitations of a public cloud. Nutanix technology mitigates all the challenges and fulfil the requirements of course with best cost benefit analysis.
I can say Nutanix is a revolutionary product, especially for people who currently invest most of their time in maintaining IT infrastructure rather than focusing on the business plan and on the expansion plan. Nutanix has changed the working day for me. Now I don’t have to look after infrastructure at all, and I have spare time to concentrate on planning.
Ahmedabad-based Indian conglomerate Kunvarji Group’s ambitions for its financial services business unit were frustrated by the limitations of its IT infrastructure. They were working with a hybrid cloud model but found that it required constant maintenance and highly stretched the resources of the group’s lean IT team. Vishal Bhatt, General Manager for IT, says long days were common for team members, who had got used to working until well past midnight to resolve service outages.
Routine maintenance was also a challenge and different datacentre locations makes servicing more laborious. It tied up most of the team, leaving little time for planning and rolling out new services. When those services were introduced, Bhatt says, the process was laborious.
“When we received new business requirements we had to assess the need for new servers and other infrastructure, and then evaluate the requirements of whatever new applications we wanted to introduce,” he explains. “Then we would speak to three or maybe four vendors, each of which would take their own time to give us final pricing and so on. Plus, there would be issues around liability, delivery and installation. All up, it would easily take two to three months,” said Bhatt.
The performance limitations of the group’s infrastructure were a further block to innovation. The business had been planning an online trading app since 2017 but wasn’t confident that its current architecture could support the microsecond performance required from trading platforms.
In mid-2019 Kunvarji Group tackled its IT infrastructure challenges head-on by adopting Nutanix Enterprise Cloud and Prism. The project was executed successfully by our established partner Hitachi Systems Micro Clinic.
“Handling IT infrastructures particularly in financial service industry is particularly challenging especially when dealing with regulatory requirements and fast-changing business landscape. In such situation, we were looking for a setup which can be flexible enough to adapt to the changes and enhancements but avoid the limitations of a public cloud. Nutanix technology mitigates all the challenges and fulfill the requirements of course with best cost benefit analysis,” said Nayan Thakkar, managing director of Kunvarji.
The solution was a cost-effective alternative to transitioning more of its financial service’s applications to the cloud, in part because of the OPEX savings the IT team calculated Nutanix would deliver. “In our case, after one payment at the outset, there would also be no further regular costs for the Nutanix solution,” Bhatt says.
New applications deployed in just hours
Kunvarji ’s new trading app, TradesApp, is now up and running on Nutanix. Bhatt says the experience of deploying TradesApp and other new apps has shown his team that what used to take several months now just take hours.
“Naturally we still need to understand the business requirements, and that takes time,” he says. “But the installation and the setup of the new app takes two to three hours.”
Staff productivity soars
After consolidating all datacentre operations on-premise, Kunvarji has sharply reduced downtime and has eliminated much of the overhead associated with software patching, upgrades and other routine tasks in the Group’s environment. For example, taking cold backups of database on separate servers which used to take three to four hours, are now completed in less than an hour.
Bhatt believes staff productivity has improved by 30% as a result, and says his team is working late much less often.
Operating costs slashed by up to 45%
Kunvarji Group’s IT team had ambitious targets for reducing operating costs (space, utilities and manpower costs) and Bhatt says the early indications are that the Nutanix deployment is hitting them.
“Our previous setup consisted of between 40 to 50 servers, four major storage systems, a couple of firewalls and a lot of switches. It was quite complicated. We had ten to 11 equipment racks. After we shifted to Nutanix, almost half of those racks were no longer required,” said Bhatt.
“We’re achieving a 30% reduction in active cooling requirements and power consumption is down by 45% compared to the previous setup,” he says.
IT performance transformed
Bhatt says his Nutanix environment has dramatically reduced latency in online applications, something that is especially critical for trading platforms.
“We’d been planning our TradesApp online stock and commodity markets trading app since early 2017 but doubted our conventional setup could run it the way we wanted. Then we discovered Nutanix and realised that its performance meant we could host online applications of that type in our on-premises infrastructure. We were right; we actually got better performance than we expected,” said Bhatt.
Almost as significant, he says, is the new-found ability to rapidly scale. “In the event of high volatility in the stock markets, we can able to scale up the compute power in seconds without any disruption of live services.”
Delighted internal customers
The radical improvement brought about by Nutanix AHV to Finstock’s app performance, along with the speedy rollout of new services, took some of Bhatt’s internal users by surprise.
“My management and also the customer retention people were very happy with the improvements they’ve been seeing,” he says. “They were surprised, really – they were fascinated by the set up and wanted to know if there was some magic in the technology.”
Nutanix deployment for Kunvarji’s financial services was the first in what Kunvarji Group sees as a staged transition. While it is still early days, Bhatt expects the group’s three other major verticals – warehousing, commodity exports and real estate – to also transition to Nutanix.
In the meantime, Bhatt’s team plans to complete the transition of its existing VMware environment to Nutanix AHV and to roll out in excess of 100 Virtual Desktop endpoints across the business. It is also considering adopting Nutanix Files for file storage, and Flow for application-centric security.