US Mortgage of Florida needed a simpler platform to accommodate growth, without increasing IT spending.
Nutanix Xpress with AHV virtualization and built-in Prism interface
US Mortgage of Florida (USMTG) was relying on an aging IT infrastructure to run its MS Exchange and MS SQL servers, in addition to a Microsoft Small Business Server and several terminal servers. With the company’s rapid growth—from 10 employees in 2010 to over 200 today—the legacy systems were becoming overloaded and were very difficult to manage. USMTG needed to find a budget-friendly solution to run its growing workloads on one platform, while maintaining operational simplicity.
System Design, USMTG’s managed service provider, presented several options for the server and storage upgrade project. “My first thought was to just expand the legacy infrastructure that USMTG was already using,” explained Brent Sudeck, CTO of System Design. “But by the time I added up all of the hardware and software components needed with the legacy approach, it was the same price as buying just one Nutanix Xpress block, which would be far easier to manage.” Sudeck first heard about the Xpress offering at a local Nutanix User Group meeting. “Running IT infrastructure shouldn’t be hard anymore,” he shared. “Nutanix has stepped up to the challenge and made everything simple. That’s why the 2U Nutanix Xpress system with integrated storage, server, virtualization, and data protection all in one cost-effective, turnkey appliance was the perfect choice for USMTG’s upgrade.”
Running IT Infrastructure shouldn’t be hard anymore. Nutanix has made everything so simple that I was able to reduce my deployment time from two weeks to two hours!
“Deploying clusters with VMware is fairly intuitive—but it’s very time-consuming,” Sudeck explained. “It used to take two weeks to get everything to a point where I could start moving VMs over with VMware. We were able to deploy Nutanix Xpress and start moving VMs over in just two hours. I’m really glad that we decided to try the Nutanix system out, and it certainly has lived up to the hype.”
As part of the transition from legacy infrastructure to the hyperconverged platform, USMTG chose to migrate from VMware ESXi to the built-in Nutanix AHV hypervisor. “With AHV, I can do upgrades in real-time without shutting down any of my VMs,” noted Sudeck. “Whenever I had to do an ESXi hypervisor upgrade, I would schedule it over a weekend so I didn’t disrupt end users. With Nutanix Xpress and AHV, there’s no need to shut down systems, no disruption, no reboots, and nobody notices anything since it is all happening in the background. With Xpress, it’s just two clicks and it’s done. That’s the way all upgrades should be.”
Nutanix Xpress with AHV was also a great choice for the mortgage lender’s small IT budget, lowering TCO by approximately 65%. USMTG is now expanding into a new data center, which will require even more hardware and hypervisor licensing. “By moving to AHV, we have eliminated all of our expensive hypervisor licensing fees,” noted Sudeck. “The cost savings we have obtained with Nutanix Xpress has made it an excellent choice for USMTG.”
“The ability to manage our entire environment using Nutanix Prism is really a big deal for us,” noted Sudeck. “Having one pane of glass puts all of the information I need at my fingertips. There’s barely any management required with Nutanix Xpress. Once things are set up, there isn’t anything we need to do on the hypervisor or the hardware level on a day-to-day basis.”
US Mortgage now supports a very diverse collection of workloads on Nutanix Xpress, including its MS SQL and Exchange workloads, terminal and application servers, and a growing set of custom workloads. “Our largest workload on Nutanix Xpress is currently our MS Exchange deployment,” Sudeck said. “We receive about 85,000 emails each month and send 2,000 every day–and that number is only going to go up as our company expands. Nutanix Xpress is easily handling that large workload with lots of headroom to spare.”
“Another huge advantage of Nutanix Xpress is the built-in data protection,” Sudeck noted. “With our previous solution, it used to take at least four days to download and manually set up data protection before we could start making backup copies. With Nutanix, we just clicked two checkboxes and everything was working perfectly. I had it imaging VMs for our backups that same night.”
“The Nutanix Support team has been very responsive,” Sudeck concluded. “If they ever detect an error on my system, they proactively reach out to see what’s going on. We appreciate the fact that Nutanix gives its smaller customers the same level of support as their biggest enterprise customers. They have definitely exceeded all of our expectations for their products as well as the level of support.”