X-Powered Service Provider Consolidates Infrastructure to Deliver State of the Art Services to Customers
QTS partnered with Nutanix to deliver private cloud services, increasing the scaleability, flexibility and agility to meet changing customer needs. Results include 100% up-time and an NPS score of 100 for their private cloud environment.
Nutanix X-Powered platform Powers Rapid Service Deployment
COMPANY
QTS Realty Trust, Inc. is a leading provider of data center solutions throughout North America.
INDUSTRY
Service provider
BUSINESS NEEDS
Deploy hosted private cloud offerings and other services to end customers more quickly, while streamlining internal IT operations.
SOLUTIONS
- Nutanix Enterprise Cloud
- VMware vSphere
BENEFITS
- Enhanced customer experience enabled by ability to develop and deploy new service offerings at cloud speed.
- Improved visibility and control over data center operations enabled by consolidating all workflows and applications onto one hyperconverged infrastructure.
- Accelerated revenue flows enabled by rapid deployment for faster billing.
CHALLENGE
QTS has built up an impressive business delivering secure, compliant infrastructure solutions, robust connectivity, and premium customer service to leading enterprise and government clients. This innovative service provider succeeds by understanding and anticipating fast-changing customer needs.
As organizations in every industry migrate toward multi-cloud solutions, QTS realized that applications and workloads not suited for the public cloud would need a dedicated environment.
“We decided about a year and a half ago that we would cover the market with a hosted private cloud offering,” says Steven Rosenthal, Senior Product Specialist at QTS. “As the market shifted toward public cloud offerings, we felt the hybrid market was where we could excel.”
Becoming an X-Powered Service Provider
QTS was seeking to accelerate not only its ability to create new solutions, but also deploy them to customers, to ensure a superior customer experience.
“We want to be more cloud-like,” explains Rosenthal. “People know that they can go to a company like AWS, swipe a credit card, and be up and running fast. Although they don’t expect us to put up a dedicated private cloud for them in ten minutes, they do expect it to be up and running in fewer than 60 days.”
After considering a variety of solutions, QTS chose to become an X-Powered service provided by adopting the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud to provide a hyperconverged platform to support its hybrid cloud solution.
“We ran a bake-off with competitors, and Nutanix was the best choice by far in terms of features, support as a partner, and the best future path,” says Rosenthal.
SOLUTION
Nutanix Enterprise Cloud is the foundation for the QTS Hosted Private Cloud solution. This private cloud offering provides its customers with the efficiency of the public cloud with predictable monthly costs, and no upfront capital investment. It is a dedicated environment that lets organizations run any application mix, at any scale, on a single platform.
Nutanix provides a single, scalable architecture to support the service offering, combining compute and storage resources with intelligent software, to eliminate the challenges associated with conventional infrastructure. It enables QTS to employ a repeatable model for fast deployment of new service offerings to customer sites, without requiring individual components to be shipped and set up.
“A typical three-tier environment requires setting up a SAN array, as well as configuring server blades and chassis,” says J.J. McDaniel, Senior Cloud Architect at QTS. “Now, with a single button deployment with the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, we can stand up much of the environment in less than an hour once it is racked, stacked, and cabled.”
QTS also utilizes the Nutanix solution to support its internal data center operations.
“We employ the Nutanix platform for our data center infrastructure management (DCIM),” says McDaniel. “It lets us consolidate management of power, cooling, and other key operations on with a single view. We also have streaming video running on Nutanix, which we use for data center security. It saves a lot of money compared to a separate solution.”
Nutanix Prism provides end-to-end management across the QTS data center. It streamlines and automates workflows, while eliminating the need for multiple management solutions.
QTS was especially impressed with the Nutanix Support team, which provided in-depth assistance with installation and training.
“Our partnership has been outstanding,” says Rosenthal. “Nutanix helped train our operations staff, sales staff, and SEs.”
“We hosted multiple workshops, and Nutanix flew people in who stayed several nights to help us cover all of our shifts and make sure they were covered,” adds McDaniel. “That really helped out our implementation team.”
BENEFITS
Nutanix Enterprise Cloud has enabled QTS to dramatically speed deployment of new services to customers. The result is faster time to market, as well as an improved ability to meet escalating service expectations—and accelerate revenue flows.
“We don’t start billing a customer until we turn that environment over to them,” says Rosenthal. “With Nutanix, we can start billing the customer much faster than with an old style architecture. We can get a customer up and running within a few weeks instead of 30 to 60 days.”
Managing a single consolidated environment instead of multiple devices has also delivered dividends for QTS. With Nutanix Prism, its management and support staff gain the insight they need to solve problems better and respond to customer issues faster.
“Our internal operations team gains the advantages and ease of management over our entire environment using Nutanix Prism,” says Rosenthal.
“Our previous server management tools worked well, but with Nutanix we can also manage storage and all the other solution components in one location,” says McDaniel. “It has simplified the dashboard experience for our front lines. When customers call into our operations center, our support staff can pull up all the hardware and storage details they require, all on a single dashboard.”
In the near future, QTS is planning to use the included Nutanix AHV hypervisor to gain additional control and operational agility over its hyperconverged environment. Migrating to AHV has the potential to unlock substantial savings in licensing costs compared to the firm’s existing hypervisor solution.
“AHV is very price competitive compared to our current solution, and it also helps position us to better automate processes,” says Rosenthal. “It’s all part of our strategy to move toward a more cloud-like experience.”
QTS has established a more innovative, responsive organization by migrating its internalIT processes and external service offerings to Nutanix. The organization is looking forward to continuing to expand and add new capabilities to its scalable platform well into the future.