Traditional IT infrastructure was under great pressure to provide high performance, reliability, and security with high efficiency.
Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform
Spreadtrum Communications, Inc. is a fabless semiconductor company that develops mobile chipset platforms for smartphones, feature phones, and other consumer electronics products.
The chip research and development and design sector requires significant investments in top-notch personnel and resources, however, its core achievements basically are in digital assets like IPR, drawings, and design documents. Maintaining secure and locked down permissions of these digital assets has remained an important task for the business.
Along with the development of semiconductor technologies, chip designing process and outcomes are becoming increasingly more complex, requiring additional professional research and development staff and resources. Therefore, it remains critical for Spreadtrum’s IT department to enhance collaboration between its research and development teams, keeping security and access controls top of mind.
Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) was the perfect solution to solve Spreadtrum’s current concerns, but the challenge was in choosing the appropriate VDI infrastructure.
After researching and comparing legacy three-tier architectures to hyperconverged infrastructure, Spreadtrum decided that the legacy approach was not adequate for its environment going forward. After conducting a feasibility study with Nutanix experts, Spreadtrum made the decision to adopt the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform to run VDI. Some of the gating factors included identifying the best technology, cutting costs, and reducing the risks of moving to a new platform.
In terms of technology, linear scalability was one of the key factors that Spreadtrum considered when choosing an enterprise cloud platform for VDI. Compared with conventional scale-up computing and storage architecture, the hyperconverged scale-out distributed architecture eliminates the upper limit of performance and capacity. In the case of any IT workloads approaching full capacity, simply adding nodes enables the linear increase of computing capabilities and storage capacity.
This is critical in building the right VDI infrastructure, since the number of users would continue to grow over time from the initial deployment size. The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform perfectly adapts to new business demands, without incurring high upfront costs on idle equipment, ensuring great user productivity as requirements change. Adding compute and storage through non-disruptive upgrades is seamless and unnoticeable by end users.
The adoption of Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform has dramatically simplified day-to-day IT maintenance, which serves as a strong support for Spreadtrum’s datacenter strategies, enabling the efficient collaboration of the research and development team.
Fast Deployment with High Security, Stability, and Performance The Nutanix solution was deployed in two stages. The first stage started in May of 2014 and deployed four nodes in approximately five months; the second stage started in mid-2015 and deployed a total of 27 nodes in a large-scale deployment.
The fast deployment of the Nutanix solution has impressed Spreadtrum. The solution was moved to production in just three days, which allowed the team to focus on optimizing the entire VDI platform and set up monitoring.
The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform has provided a secure and stable platform for Spreadtrum’s chip development, an important technical support platform for its datacenter strategy, and increased collaboration between its cross-site joint research and development activities and third-party cooperative teams.
With simplified management, the Nutanix solution delivers a substantially shortened response time and significantly improved IT desktop standardization, greatly increasing the overall desktop operation efficiency and customer satisfaction.
The great support Nutanix provides enhances Shen Lei’s confidence in the future of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform at Spreadtrum: “The Nutanix solution will be one of our most critical research and development supporting platforms. We are looking to introduce GPU to enhance the VDI graphing capabilities, expand its scale, and improve sustainable supporting capabilities of the IT infrastructure. This will help meet the needs of technological innovations and foster new research and development activities as well as speed growth of the company.” Spreadtrum is the first semiconductor company in Mainland China to deploy Nutanix’s VDI solution, and has already become a successful practitioner in deploying the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform.