South African ICT Solutions Provider Adopts Full Nutanix Environment to Make Cloud Migration Easier for Customers while Optimizing In-house Resources
While it is primarily a cloud service provider, iNFOTECH delivers enterprise solutions to its customers. It provides infrastructure-as-a-service as well as virtual private cloud solutions based, all of which are now hosted on its updated environment hosted on Nutanix. Additional services include disaster recovery-as-a-service and a range of hybrid cloud offerings.
Essentially, iNFOTECH runs infrastructure for its customers built on a comprehensive Nutanix solutions stack. The most pressing need of the organization is to provide a comprehensive hyperconverged solution that can expand as the client needs of their cloud environments continue to scale while delivering the associated security benefits.
Essentially, iNFOTECH runs infrastructure for its customers built on a comprehensive Nutanix solutions stack. The most pressing need of the organization is to provide a comprehensive hyperconverged solution that can expand as the client needs of their cloud environments continue to scale while delivering the associated security benefits.
Key Results
Ease of Use
Simplified approach to cloud migration enables iNFOTECH specialist resources to focus on more strategic technology functions.
Improved TCO
Using Nutanix, customers will see a significant return on investment over a shorter period of time than competitor offerings.
Improved TCO
The Nutanix environment costs less to maintain and ensures iNFOTECH resources are optimized to deliver on customer needs.
“Nutanix has been phenomenal. From the support they provide to the technology infrastructure, we have complete peace of mind that we can deliver a world-class hosted infrastructure solution to our customers. No business wants to experience downtime and Nutanix empowers us to deliver a completely available solution to our customers.“
Mauritz du Toit
Challenges
iNFOTECH is a multi-disciplinary technology company with a range of solutions focused on delivering business value to customers in real time.
“We had walked a long road with our old infrastructure. But when the need arose to refresh the environment, we decided to look for something completely new. We wanted a platform that would afford us the cost flexibility and the scale the customers of our cloud business are demanding. It’s how we landed on Nutanix,” says Mauritz du Toit, CEO at iNFOTECH. As most of the iNFOTECH clients are cloud-only, the organization needed a cost-effective way to provide a fully hosted infrastructure offering while covering the associated support and security requirements. In effect, the company needed to improve and build out its cloud business to meet customer demand. This is especially crucial at a time where many South African businesses are turning to the cloud to mitigate against the disruption caused by load shedding – state-controlled power outages that sees rolling electricity blackouts being implemented. “While we deliver cloud solutions to several clients in the SME space, we don’t limit our client reach. For example, we currently host a micro-bank’s cloud infrastructure and another large organization who uses our real estate to run a full Sage implementation. Today we are hosting critical applications for several banks, which means that the services we offer need to be superior, scalable, and always available,” adds du Toit. Moreover, it was critical that the chosen environment would deliver the uptime needed to ensure iNFOTECH customers would not experience any disruptions to their operations.
“We had walked a long road with our old infrastructure. But when the need arose to refresh the environment, we decided to look for something completely new. We wanted a platform that would afford us the cost flexibility and the scale the customers of our cloud business are demanding. It’s how we landed on Nutanix,” says Mauritz du Toit, CEO at iNFOTECH. As most of the iNFOTECH clients are cloud-only, the organization needed a cost-effective way to provide a fully hosted infrastructure offering while covering the associated support and security requirements. In effect, the company needed to improve and build out its cloud business to meet customer demand. This is especially crucial at a time where many South African businesses are turning to the cloud to mitigate against the disruption caused by load shedding – state-controlled power outages that sees rolling electricity blackouts being implemented. “While we deliver cloud solutions to several clients in the SME space, we don’t limit our client reach. For example, we currently host a micro-bank’s cloud infrastructure and another large organization who uses our real estate to run a full Sage implementation. Today we are hosting critical applications for several banks, which means that the services we offer need to be superior, scalable, and always available,” adds du Toit. Moreover, it was critical that the chosen environment would deliver the uptime needed to ensure iNFOTECH customers would not experience any disruptions to their operations.
Solution
Following its decision to deploy Nutanix as the preferred fabric for its cloud engine room, iNFOTECH also elected to become a Nutanix partner. The idea was that it knew that Nutanix cloud infrastructure provided significant cost-savings over the costs of traditional service providers. Whereas previously, iNFOTECH had to make significant upfront commitment on hardware and software licenses with its software providers, Nutanix simplified and streamlined these costs.
But beyond the cost aspect, the support Nutanix provided was excellent as it enabled the iNFOTECH engineers to focus on more strategic functions instead of maintaining cloud uptime. “The upgrade just made sense as it immediately offered us the flexible and agile environment we needed. Using Nutanix, iNFOTECH is now able to provide each virtual data center that is spun up on our cloud with a dedicated firewall. Even more compelling, we can give customers the option to implement their own firewall if they prefer to do so,” says du Toit. The new iNFOTECH Private Cloud Solutions are now designed to ensure a high level of infrastructure resiliency, while introducing self-healing capabilities that eliminate fire drills. Its upgraded Nutanix-powered environment has built-in features that include snapshots, clones, and replication to meet specific customer needs. iNFOTECH now provides a product agnostic neutral disaster recovery workload hosting supporting Azure, Hyper-V, AWS, and VMware Nutanix.
But beyond the cost aspect, the support Nutanix provided was excellent as it enabled the iNFOTECH engineers to focus on more strategic functions instead of maintaining cloud uptime. “The upgrade just made sense as it immediately offered us the flexible and agile environment we needed. Using Nutanix, iNFOTECH is now able to provide each virtual data center that is spun up on our cloud with a dedicated firewall. Even more compelling, we can give customers the option to implement their own firewall if they prefer to do so,” says du Toit. The new iNFOTECH Private Cloud Solutions are now designed to ensure a high level of infrastructure resiliency, while introducing self-healing capabilities that eliminate fire drills. Its upgraded Nutanix-powered environment has built-in features that include snapshots, clones, and replication to meet specific customer needs. iNFOTECH now provides a product agnostic neutral disaster recovery workload hosting supporting Azure, Hyper-V, AWS, and VMware Nutanix.
Customer Outcome
With the deployment of the Nutanix Ultimate offering, iNFOTECH has been able to migrate customers more easily from its current environments to the full Nutanix cloud infrastructure. The organization can perform live updates without customers experiencing any downtime while also getting comprehensive support from the vendor when needed.
Not only can customers deploy their own firewall applications on their virtual data centers to further support their security requirements, but iNFOTECH can also rapidly clone virtual machines of customers in their own disaster recovery environment. According to iNFOTECH CEO Mauritz du Toit, “The great thing about Nutanix has been that we do not just focus on our own cloud infrastructure but can sell Nutanix to other customers who do not want to host in the cloud themselves. We now provide professional services to customers looking to migrate from their own on-site infrastructure to a Nutanix environment.” With Nutanix, iNFOTECH also provides full encryption on the hosted data and applications. “Nutanix provides us with peace of mind and ease of use for iNFOTECH to improve service delivery to customers.”
Not only can customers deploy their own firewall applications on their virtual data centers to further support their security requirements, but iNFOTECH can also rapidly clone virtual machines of customers in their own disaster recovery environment. According to iNFOTECH CEO Mauritz du Toit, “The great thing about Nutanix has been that we do not just focus on our own cloud infrastructure but can sell Nutanix to other customers who do not want to host in the cloud themselves. We now provide professional services to customers looking to migrate from their own on-site infrastructure to a Nutanix environment.” With Nutanix, iNFOTECH also provides full encryption on the hosted data and applications. “Nutanix provides us with peace of mind and ease of use for iNFOTECH to improve service delivery to customers.”
Next Steps
iNFOTECH has been live for almost a year on the new Nutanix cloud environment. In the short-term, the iNFOTECH team is looking to migrate more customers from their current infrastructure to Nutanix cloud infrastructure.
The next phase will see iNFOTECH encouraging its customers to run Kubernetes on the Nutanix cloud environment.
The next phase will see iNFOTECH encouraging its customers to run Kubernetes on the Nutanix cloud environment.
Read the article on: ITWeb
