NRC’s aging legacy infrastructure was unreliable and not easy to scale. By moving to Nutanix, NRC has simplified storage and server management, improved disaster recovery, increased the speed of deploying new servers, and enabled the IT team to leave the office without worrying about system failures.
Information Technology Consulting Services
Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform
Hardware and Software
New Resources Consulting (NRC) is an information technology provider based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. “We provide managed services to hundreds of clients across the U.S. and Canada, focusing mainly on Oracle and PeopleSoft deployments,” explained Chris Hippensteel, network and system administrator at NRC. “We also provide water and waste management services to clients in Los Angeles, Boston, and Denver. Our main datacenter is located in Milwaukee, and we have a sister site in Winston-Salem North Carolina that runs off of our platform here.”
NRC was relying on a collection of aging legacy servers and storage systems when Hippensteel joined the company two years ago. “The systems were always breaking,” he noted. “Most of the equipment was so old that I had to search online sites for replacement parts. Our team was constantly putting out fires instead of working on growing the company, procuring new equipment, and implementing new processes.”
In addition to dealing with the aging infrastructure, NRC was also running out of capacity for new projects. “We were maxed out with what we had,” Hippensteel explained. “Trying to spin up new development environments was almost impossible. Adding anything to our existing environment worried me because I wasn’t sure if our SAN could handle the load. As a result, I was spending far too many anxious hours in the office away from my family, making sure that everything wasn’t crashing.”
Another big challenge for NRC was the need to maintain multiple software development and testing environments. “We have to develop our software using a wide variety of different servers and operating systems based on what our clients are using,” explained Hippensteel. “Not only do we have to test everything in our clients’ current environments, we have to make sure everything will work when they upgrade to newer versions of their OS. Supporting all of those environments was no small task for our developers or IT team.”
Finding Nutanix
Hippensteel was first introduced to the Enterprise Cloud platform when he attended a Star Wars movie preview sponsored by Nutanix a few years ago. “In addition to seeing a great movie, I got a chance to see the Nutanix platform in action and was intrigued by the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). Since we were all tired of working non-stop to keep the old SAN up, we decided that it was is a great time to move up to Nutanix.”
NRC is now running 80% of its development and production workloads on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, including all of its network services and domain controllers, DHCP and FTP servers, and external website servers. The Nutanix systems are also used by NRC’s development team that write custom software for the company’s managed service customers.
Time for Other Projects
By moving to Nutanix, NRC’s IT team is now able to focus on more strategic projects. “Nutanix has enabled us to tackle all of the other projects that had gotten stuck on the back burner, including our Microsoft Office 365 roll out and SharePoint upgrade. I was never able to keep up with all of the patches and upgrades, or implement new projects before because I was so busy putting out fires. We are also closing more service tickets than are being created, which is a good for our internal users and customers.”
Simplified Management and Faster Deployments
“Nutanix has simplified our operations and reduced costs tremendously,” Hippensteel reported. “It’s easy to view the health of the Nutanix platform using Prism, as well as all of our remote servers and everything else in our environment in one dashboard. I don’t have to open several different management tools to see all of our metrics anymore. When I first started working at NRC, storage and server management was an all-day-long activity. With Nutanix, I just log in first thing the morning, look at the health of the system, and then go about my day.”
“Spinning up new servers in our old environment took at least two hours,” Hippensteel reported. “With Nutanix, it takes just 15 minutes to get an entire server up, configured, and ready for my development team to start building out client solutions. In addition to serving our existing clients faster, it has enabled us to expand the number of accounts we can serve and increase company revenue.”
Better Backups
NRC hosts all of its workloads at the company’s main data center in Milwaukee and stores backups at a hosted location in the cloud. By moving to Nutanix, NRC’s backup times have decreased significantly. “It used to take three days to back up our software server with 2TB of data,” Hippensteel said. “With Nutanix on the backend, we can easily do that in under a day.”
Freedom to Play with Better Work-Life Balance
Hippensteel and his team were spending far too much time in the office before moving to Nutanix. “There were multiple times where I had to cancel plans with my family when a crisis happened in the datacenter. As a result, I always made tentative plans because I knew something was going to break and I’d have to go back to the office. But not anymore—Nutanix is a ‘set it and forget it’ platform. With the reliability of the Enterprise Cloud, I can now make plans with my friends and family—and actually stick to them.”
Moving from VMware to AHV
NRC is currently running the VMware hypervisor, but plans to move to AHV within the year. “Moving to the Nutanix hypervisor will allow us to save a lot of money on VMware licensing. That’s great for our company, and we can also roll that savings into what we charge our customers. One of our corporate goals at NRC is to ‘drive continuous improvements through the use of technology.’ By migrating to the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud platform, it’s going to make it much easier for us to meet our IT and service delivery goals,” concluded Hippensteel.
One of our corporate goals at NRC is to ‘drive continuous improvements through the use of technology.’ By migrating to the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud platform, it’s going to make it much easier for us to meet our IT and service delivery goals.