Needed a reliable and easily managed infrastructure solution for new IaaS offering that would provide the ability to begin with a small deployment and scale quickly with demand.
After many successful years as an IT reseller, Micro Logic made the decision to launch a new hybrid cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering for its clients. Since it was not possible to accurately predict how many customers would be signing up for the new service at the beginning, they needed a solution that would enable them to start with small infrastructure investments and quickly scale as demand for the private cloud offering increased.
“We looked at providing IaaS the traditional way, with separate servers, SANs, and switches, but that approach would have required us to make a large upfront investment without knowing how many customers we would be serving,” noted Guy Gagnon, VP of Service at Micro Logic. “So instead of investing heavily at first, we needed a more flexible solution that would allow us to grow our service and costs incrementally.”
“We initially looked at Nutanix, and the traditional vendors, since we resell several of those solutions,” Gagnon admitted. “Nutanix was the only one that enabled us to start with a small upfront capital investment and scale easily. Had we gone with the other options, it would have cost us at least three times as much to launch our new service.”
Micro Logic now has 20 Nutanix nodes, including several NX-1065, NX-1050, and the larger NX-3060 systems, installed at the company’s three datacenters in Québec City, Montréal, and Ottawa. They are now planning on placing an additional Nutanix system in Montréal in the fall. “Scaling with Nutanix is very simple,” Gagnon shared. “Since the growth in our IaaS service is linear, we know exactly how many VMs will run on each node. With Nutanix, we can incrementally add more nodes on a just-in-time basis as we get more customers.”
“We spend a lot of time managing other aspects of the infrastructure, but we don’t have to spend much time on the Nutanix stack at all, it runs fine on its own,” Gagnon said. “I also like Nutanix’s one-click upgrades. They always run without any glitches and never disrupt our operations. Our cloud admin team doesn’t have to perform upgrades on the weekends anymore; they can complete them quickly during normal working hours without impacting performance for our public cloud customers.”
“All of our IaaS customers have seen huge improvements in performance when moving to the new cloud service on Nutanix—it’s even faster than their on-premise infrastructure in many cases,” Gagnon said. “As far as the availability metric, we haven’t had any downtime at all in the year and a half we’ve been on Nutanix. This is enabling us to meet all of our customer SLAs, and obviously, we’re very happy about that!”
“The Nutanix support experience has been excellent,” according to Gagnon. “Whenever our cloud operation team calls Nutanix Support, they receives a call back very quickly—even late at night—and the solution and the resolution is always as we would expect.”
Nutanix Acropolis is a powerful scale-out data fabric for storage, compute, and virtualization. Acropolis combines feature-rich software-defined storage with built-in virtualization (AHV) in a turnkey hyperconverged infrastructure solution that can run any application at any scale. “We are evaluating the possibility of running AHV on a future new Nutanix cluster in order to offer an OpenStack offering. We are confident that AHV would be a great addition for us, and help us lower the costs to compete with more aggressive offerings on the market,” Gagnon explained.
The move to Nutanix has enabled Micro Logic to launch its immediately successful IaaS service and rapidly scale the service to meet the surging demand. In addition to the IaaS offering, Micro Logic also launched a new backup and disaster recovery service. “Nutanix is the easiest part of the entire stack in terms of deployment and day-to-day management,” noted Gagnon. “By choosing Nutanix, we obtained an easily scalable, reliable, and powerful solution for our new IaaS offering—at an excellent price. It’s great that we don’t have to worry about that piece of our infrastructure anymore.”
“We built a great virtual private cloud offering,” Gagnon concluded. “It was hard—every step along the way was a challenge—technologically, market-wise, or in terms of client knowledge. By relying on the Nutanix platform, we were able to focus on all of those different aspects, as opposed to just focusing on the hardware side of things. We are very pleased to have developed this important expertise as cloud specialists using Nutanix, and are looking to pass it forward to our clientele so they can benefit from our experiences as well.”
By choosing Nutanix, we obtained an easily scalable, reliable, and powerful solution for our new IaaS offering—at an excellent price. It’s great that we don’t have to worry about that piece of our infrastructure anymore.