Customers

Streamlined Global VDI for FTSE 100 Financial Firm

This customer, one of Europe’s leading investment management groups, maintains truly global operations: an ongoing presence in 39 countries/ territories, totaling over 10,000 employees. Their International Network capabilities stretch even further, supporting the firm’s work in 135 countries. Operations of this scale and geographic breadth present unique management challenges for IT administrators.

Company / Industry

FTSE 100 Financial Services Organization.

Business Need

Highly available infrastructure for VDI and critical end-user applications

Solution

  • Nutanix Enterprise Cloud
  • Cisco UCS server
  • Citrix XenDesktop
  • Microsoft Windows Server

Benefits

  • Improve application responsiveness
  • Shorter time to deployment
  • TCO reduction of 40%

CHALLENGE

The customer previously employed a legacy datacenter infrastructure setup with no high availability or load balancing; key infrastructure was being bogged down by chronic storage bottlenecks. This situation was directly impacting the organization’s ability to successfully support mission-critical applications for their end users.

Issues including sprawling, highly fragmented management needs, sluggish scalability, and inflexible resource provisioning created almost daily headaches.

The customer decided on an upgrade approach that would attack these issues on three fronts:

  1. INFRASTRUCTURE MODERNIZATION: manage a focused transition from legacy IT systems to flexible, scalable assets optimized for the specific challenge at hand.
  2. SYSTEM MANAGEMENT STREAMLINING: simplify unnecessarily siloed management tasks, automating routine administration wherever possible.
  3. IMPROVED RELIABILITY AND COST MANAGEMENT: the customer needed improved uptime/capacity for a truly global userbase, while maintaining a flexible but growth-friendly cost model.

SOLUTION

Working with Nutanix Global System Integrator partner HCL, the customer took advantage of Nutanix Enterprise Cloud’s native support for a wide array of leading hardware and hypervisor options. Deployed on Cisco UCS servers, Nutanix now supports Citrix XenDesktop for 1,350 active users, including disaster recover capacity.

RESULTS

Modernization: the customer’s Nutanix deployment allowed for unprecedented responsiveness in key VDI applications. Designed with a vigilant eye toward data locality, Nutanix Enterprise Cloud ensures important desktops and user data are located as close as possible to the required memory and CPU. This approach avoids hopping between multiple networks, optimizing VDI performance. Nutanix Clusters use a sharednothing distributed architecture, avoiding bottlenecks.

System Management Streamlining: The upgraded infrastructure successfully delivered far faster rollout times for virtual desktops and applications, with key IT management and monitoring tasks unified. A single-pane interface provides for a centralized management and monitoring point for all aspects of IT infrastructure. IT professionals can orchestrate new VDI deployments using just a few clicks, or even with an automated API.

Improved Reliability and Cost Management: The customer can now add new Nutanix nodes or blocks dynamically, as operational needs arise, allowing for truly linear scaling. Infrastructure doesn’t need to be “pre-sized” for projected future needs, sharply limiting unnecessary CAPEX.

The client estimates that Nutanix reduced hardware costs by 20% compared to equivalent technology solutions and an overall TCO reduction of 40%.

NEXT STEPS

After witnessing the agility of their new environment first hand, the customer plans to take advantage of Nutanix’s scaling capabilities sooner rather later, expanding their VDI user count to over 2,800.

One of the reasons we selected Nutanix was that it gives us the freedom to build. We can use different underlying server platforms. This makes it very easy for the team, since they had to manage one single hardware For us, Nutanix gives HCL the innovative capabilities our customers need, it makes life much more simple for us.

Piyush Saxena, AVP & Head, Hybrid Cloud & DC Practice, HCL Technologies