Solutions Infini is a global cloud communication company providing Messaging, Voice, Email and APIs for enterprises and SMEs.
Cloud Communication, Telecom, Global Cloud Service Provider
To address the availability/customisation/ sovereignty limitations and high TCO of public cloud services such as AWS
Global Cloud Communication company, Solutions Infini, aims at providing the most complacent service to businesses by providing a technically robust cloud platform with high end scalability. Solutions Infini has strong operator connections in over 200 countries across the globe and depends on flexible scaling model. Over 8000 clients rely on Solutions Infini for their services. Known for providing best in class communication deliverables with adaptive scaling, Solutions Infini opts for Nutanix, and cuts TCO in half by migrating core workloads from public cloud to Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform.
An early adopter of public cloud, Solutions Infini had selected the cloud over its in-house infrastructure to host its global messaging workloads for reasons of management simplicity, easy scalability and geographical reach. As its customer base grew, however, the company began to encounter shortcomings in the public cloud approach, as Ashish Agarwal, CTO at Solutions Infini explains.
“With public cloud offerings, most of the datacentre details are abstracted out for you and made accessible through simple and easy to use interfaces, but that comes with limited choices. For example, lack of standardisation meant that we became tied to a single provider who was unable to provide a consistent service in all the regions we needed to serve.
We also faced challenges when it came to fine tuning public cloud services to meet the demands of our applications, as well as issues with data sovereignty as our geographical reach increased. Moreover, as the business grew, the TCO figures no longer made any sense.”
Increasingly concerned about these limitations, Solutions Infini decided to rethink its strategy and search for an alternative, able to match the capabilities of the public cloud, but on-premise.
Following an exhaustive investigation, that alternative turned out to be the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform hosted by Dell EMC XC Series hyperconverged appliances which the company chose as the infrastructure for the migration of key SMS gateways from AWS (Amazon Web Services) into its own datacentre.
“The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS Software running on the Dell appliances stood out because of the completeness of the package,” commented Agarwal. “The others either lacked features or had complicated management and expensive licensing requirements.” The fact that the Nutanix AHV Hypervisor is included as standard and requires no additional licensing was another key factor, especially when it came to reducing cost of ownership and integrating VM management with other resources.
“We were especially impressed by the Nutanix AHV hypervisor which is based on open source KVM, with which we were already familiar,” said Agarwal, “It can also be managed through Nutanix Prism, enabling us to manage VMs, storage and network resources seamlessly together and with minimal expertise, just like a public cloud service.”
A two-week trial further confirmed the decision to go with the Dell/Nutanix platform, with the hardware for this phase provided by Bangalore-based Nutanix partner 22by7, responsible also for the production solution.
Two installs followed, with three nodes configured in the main Bangalore datacentre and three more at a disaster recovery site in Mumbai. No additional software was required, with Solutions Infini opting to use the data replication and recovery features built into the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, as Agarwal explains:
“The integrated data replication and recovery capabilities were yet another important selling point. Allowing us to seamlessly match the high availability of public cloud services, like AWS, but without adding unnecessary complexity.”
Once the installs were complete, the task of migrating workloads to the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform quickly followed with over 100 VMs in the first phase and many more to follow.
As well as key SMS gateways, the company has also migrated other business-critical workloads to the Nutanix platform, including CRM and financial applications, together with supporting application monitoring tools and databases. The company’s test and development environments have, similarly, now been migrated to the Nutanix platform.
Very happy with the results, Agarwal has seen an immediate impact in terms of application performance with key indicators showing a 70 percent improvement for workloads previously hosted by AWS. Management overheads have also been reduced by around 80 percent, the single pane of management of Nutanix Prism freeing up staff to work on other development projects to help drive the business forward. Time to market for those new applications has noticeably improved as a result.
All-important cost of ownership (TCO) figures have also been cut in half thanks partly to the use of the Nutanix AHV Hypervisor, bundled at no extra cost and with no additional licensing requirements. Moreover, support staff have found that AHV delivers enhanced performance when it comes to functionality such as automated VM migration, memory utilisation and memory sharing, as well as delivering welcome new features in terms of RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) and network management capabilities.
Beyond improvements directly related to the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, Agarwal has also seen a welcome change when it comes to support services.
“The customer focus of Nutanix is exceptional. We especially like the practices of conducting meetings with customer focus groups and the creation of a customer advocacy team to identify new product areas/ features, plus the way staff at Nutanix connect with us for immediate resolution of issues, no matter what the cause.”
Additional nodes have already been added to the Nutanix cluster in the main Solutions Infini datacentre, with a similar expansion due soon at the disaster recovery site. The company is also planning to deploy similar setups elsewhere as part of its continued global expansion, as Madhusudhan Aithal K, AVP Technology for Solutions Infini outlines.
“It makes sense to keep on using the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud rather than the public cloud for future projects. It meets our needs in terms of scalability, availability and ease of management, it addresses all the issues we had with AWS and, crucially, has halved the IT costs involved in doing business.”
In the meantime, migration of production workloads continues apace, with the IT team planning to use the self-service portal, predictive analytics and process automation features to further match the capabilities of the public cloud, but on the company’s own terms.
The association with Nutanix has provided us a wider landscape to provide enterprises, a cloud framework that meets their business requirements with zero complexities