Outages, 6-year-old hardware, week-long migrations, vendors breathing down your neck. When your datacenter is going haywire, what do you do to alleviate that pressure? You can pour yourself a cold drink, cross your fingers, and hope for the best—or you can let the one-click simplicity of Nutanix take the wheel instead.
In the spirit of Bohemian Rhapsody, we asked our customers to describe a moment when they were “Under Pressure” in the datacenter and Nutanix helped come to the rescue. We got everything from speedy recovery times to easy migrations to this all-star comment: One director says Nutanix saves his team “Every. Single. Day. Seriously! We couldn’t do what we do without you.”
And some folks responded like Dukagjin Maloku, a KC Cloud Systems Engineer, who says he hasn’t felt under pressure once since moving to Nutanix: “Everything was smooth since the beginning with Nutanix! It’s awesome!”
As for the others? Let’s just say we helped them break free.
Can Anybody Find Me a Datacenter to Love?
Whether your team is small but mighty or large and in charge, companies of all sizes have realized the advantage of going one-click. Here are a few of our favorite stories.
Eric Kyle, Director of Network Software at Ozarks Technical Community College, had a “Is this the real life, or is this just fantasy?” moment when he needed to upgrade an 8-node cluster between their semester break, which usually takes him and his team weeks to do on 3-tier architecture. On Nutanix, he was able to accomplish that in just a few clicks and through one interface.
Chad Dorr, a University of Wisconsin Sr. Infrastructure Analyst, shares that same sentiment. With his virtualization team down to just 2 people, he and his team needed to deploy additional hosts to drive their Citrix environment. By switching to a 24-node Nutanix cluster, they were able to solve that problem, smashing their expectations. He even says, “Switching over to Nutanix-powered HCI saved us!”
Next up, we’ve got Ehtesham Ihsan, IT Manager at Kaneka Malaysia, who recalls a time when he was assigned to lead the IT department. Upon starting, he realized the entire infrastructure stack was living in a black box with little support. With help from one of his Nutanix partners, he was able to assess any gaps in the technology and the impacts these gaps would (or could) have on their business. The result? “The entire IT infrastructure is almost invisible now.”
But the best part of operating on Nutanix is, according to our customers, avoiding “Under Pressure” moments altogether. Chris Funk, IT Director at Clark County Juvenile Court, doesn’t have to manage 6-year-old hardware anymore; an admin is able to just “click and walk away” when upgrading his firmware; and a server engineer says his Nutanix-based production environment was the quickest to come back online (and with zero data loss) during a network outage.
Talk about having a good time!
Another One Bites the Dust!
In the time it takes you to perform a Nutanix upgrade, your old infrastructure will be left in the dust. (Seriously. When this lead systems engineer had an outage, his Nutanix hosts were the only ones that, in his words, were “running like a top.”)
So, let’s move into the lightning round of supersonic Nutanix results:
- One user was able to build 14 servers in less than a minute.
- Senior Systems Administrator Allan B. from Sivantos racked, stacked, and wired a Nutanix cluster in less than 2 hours and ran a foundation on it in under 40 minutes.
- After multiple failed upgrades in the past, a technical specialist was able to restore Nutanix VMs in just seconds.
- When one of this ICT officer’s servers was attacked, he was able to safely get his Nutanix environment up and running in under 10 minutes.
- Since moving to Nutanix, this senior systems admin has enjoyed over 3 years of “flawless uptime.”
- This IT support manager was able to restore a, in his words, “screwed server,” in about 10 minutes.
- Since Fred Berrange’s business must operate 24/7/365, he needed his system availability to be better than 90%. On Nutanix, he enjoys 100% availability and zero overtime expenditure.
- And finally, one of our personal favorites comes from this server infrastructure engineer: “I was stressed to have to build an entire environment in just 2 days. 5 hours later as I was finishing up, I said ‘Thanks, Nutanix’ and went to lunch.”
Just a Poor Budget from a Poor Family
IT budgets are limited, and if all your finances are going into buying proprietary technology from a single vendor or over-provisioning your resources for the next 3-5 years, that budget will quickly go from tight to tiny.
Under the constraint of a finite budget, these companies found success with Nutanix pay-as-you-go economics, enjoying long-term financial success.
One computer network engineer was under tremendous pressure when his existing vendor’s licenses came up for renewal—inconveniently, at the same time as his hardware refresh. “I had to find a cost effective way to look after the cost of the VM license as well as the cost of replacing 2 SANs and 6 virtual host servers. It was Nutanix to the rescue.”
Speaking of expensive refreshes, one IT support supervisor thanks Nutanix for freeing his team “…from having to spend a ton of money on a SAN and VM Host refresh that happened to coincide.”
Guess you can say: “Mama, just killed a SAN.”
Is this the Real Life, Is This Just Fantasy?
Your real-life life is outside of the datacenter—and we’d like to keep it that way. Besides, who wants to stay in the datacenter forever? By implementing hyperconverged infrastructure, our customers have realized more time to support business missions and accomplish innovation goals.
One CPS says it best: “Having an HCI Nutanix platform is a win because it helped me optimize loads and focus on other projects.”
But not all your time has to go back into your business. Remember your weekends? Remember “me time”? Hyperconvergence lets you enjoy those, too. Even while performing a Nutanix upgrade, Bradley Burgess, Systems Administrator from the Maryland Lottery Agency, says he always gets to leave work on time thanks to the one-click power of hyperconvergence.
And Brad Meyer, Systems Administrator at Middle Tennessee State University, enjoys the freedom of being able to walk away from his technology. In the past, he’d constantly be given too-small windows to upgrade his firmware. With Nutanix, he’s able to just click and go. For Brad, “If that’s not taking pressure off, then I don’t know what is!”
Agreed, Brad!
Don’t Stop Me (from Moving) Now!
Even if you’re fully on board with what Nutanix does, like many organizations, you might be cautious of embarking on the (seemingly) daunting task of moving onto a new environment. But we know how to make sure the show goes on.
When one network administrator had to migrate 70 servers to Nutanix, AHV and Prism helped make the move painless. Even with issues from a partner’s hardware, Nutanix took the pressure off and streamlined the process of deploying and migrating VMs onto his new environment.
One datacenter engineering manager describes the process of migrating VMs “excruciating, especially when they’re sitting in a production environment.” He thanks Nutanix data protection for quickly performing those migrations—even with external pressure from business owners.
Speaking of VM migration, this IT manager remembers a moment when he had to move 40 VMs over to Nutanix AHV. He was able to accomplish that—without affecting his normal business—thanks to Nutanix Move. With less downtime and less worrying, he was able to return to business as usual.
Here’s one last (awesome) migration story from Brandon Semien, a FMOLHS System Engineer. During a major migration project, multiple teams were huddled in a conference room from 6 PM to 4 AM. And to make matters worse, they started experiencing latency from every server. Thanks to Nutanix, he was “…amazed at how easily we were able to log into Prism Central and use Network, Storage, Health, and Hardware dashboards to determine it was network-related. We were easily able to point this out to our networking team, who were then able to determine an issue on their side. Nutanix rocks! The dashboards are easy to read and maneuver.”
Finally, here are two more great, U-Haul worthy tales of moving miracles. During one weather catastrophe, a systems engineer once had to provision over 1,000 extra virtual desktops to deal with an office closure. Thanks to Nutanix, he was seamlessly and easily able to scale his clusters to meet the demand.
And on the topic of clusters, one senior manager thanks his Nutanix cluster for saving him when he needed to have an environment built and ready to go for a go-live. For him, “Having the capacity, both compute and storage, as well as being able to ensure the user experience we needed was awesome!”
We Will, We Will Upgrade You!
And for these 12 customers, we already have—and they’re having such a good time! Learn what their datacenter challenges once were and how they’ve become IT champions since.
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Source: Nutanix.com