The implementation has resulted in nearly 40 per cent savings in data centre costs, and has created a seamless infrastructure ensuring reliability, resilience, security and flexibility.
Nutanix, the hybrid multi-cloud computing provider, announced that Bunduq Company Limited has been migrating from legacy infrastructure to the Nutanix Cloud platform and Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) to power its mission-critical applications and services.
The implementation has improved application performance by over 50 per cent, resulted in nearly 40 per cent savings in data centre costs, and has created a seamless infrastructure ensuring reliability, resilience, security and flexibility.
Bunduq Company Limited was established in December 1970 to develop the offshore El Bunduq oil field located on the border of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and the State of Qatar, some 200km west of Abu Dhabi city and 100km east of Doha. The success of the El Bunduq Oil Development Project is recognized as a result of fruitful collaboration between the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and the State of Qatar.
Speaking about the need for an overhaul of the company’s IT infrastructure, Muayad Fahmawi, IT Supervisor at Bunduq, comments, “Digital transformation is an imperative approach today. Our earlier environment was purely traditional physical infrastructure with hardware. We were plagued with issues like operational complexities, system downtime, huge delays in backup and recovery processes. The earlier environment featured a centralized SAN storage which was only a ‘scale up’ technology that limited our expansion plans. After a thorough study, we decided to opt for ‘scale out’ hyper-converged infrastructure from Nutanix, which provides the best infrastructure and removes all limitations, so we can keep growing and gradually phase out the old hardware.”
With a move from a physical to a virtualised environment, along with the Nutanix solution, the IT team at Bunduq also deployed Veeam software for modern data protection and SAP HANA multi‐model database. Both Veeam and SAP HANA have certified integrations with Nutanix.
After the Nutanix implementation, the first benefit seen was enhanced application performance. The oil-related simulation applications and sluggish software in the earlier environment saw a 50 per cent performance increase with Nutanix due to the latest processor being used and all the data reading happening through SSD drives.
Flexibility was another big benefit. Simulation applications require huge amounts of data and processing power. With Nutanix, the IT team can easily increase the RAM for clients/workstations as needed. Or, in the case of VDI, the CPU performance can be quickly increased.
With strict data compliance regulations, backups were challenging for the company, taking over a day for completion and sometimes failing completely. With Veeam directly integrating with Nutanix through AHV, backup of virtual machines now happens in less than an hour.
Similar to the backup challenges, the company also faced issues relating to database testing. With the earlier physical servers, sometimes it was necessary to copy the entire database around 122GB for testing, which would take over a day and a half. Now in the same scenario, after the SAP HANA implementation on the Nutanix platform, copying a 170Gb database takes only a maximum of 5 hours.
One of the big upsides of the implementation has been the reduced complexity relating to system maintenance, thanks to Nutanix Prism. With the earlier siloed infrastructure, managing disparate systems was very challenging. Monitoring agents had to be installed for the physical servers and the IT team had to manually check whether the previous days’ backups were completed or not. “Now it’s very easy. We log into the Prism control, where we can see the live status of all the virtual machines’ performance – CPU, memory, hard disk usage, even the backup. Everything is integrated in one console. We are able to see everything!” says Muayad Fahmawi.
“In terms of upgrading and updating the server and drivers, earlier, a big plan was needed – you had to upgrade the server drivers, for example, and the hypervisor individually. And, of course, there was system downtime during the upgrades. But with Prism, it’s a one-click upgrade with no downtime,” he continues.
With the earlier infrastructure, the company had three racks in the data centre. Nutanix has helped with data centre consolidation, resulting in 40 per cent estimated cost savings due to the data centre space being reduced to half.
Speaking about the success of the project and how it will evolve in future, Muayad Fahmawi says, “Earlier we used to receive regular complaints from end‐users, and vendors like SAP, about our system performance, access to servers and other such issues, but after Nutanix, we are thrilled to say that this is a thing of the past.”
“We have one more project in the pipeline – building the SAP cluster as a disaster recovery service in Microsoft Azure. We intend to replicate directly from Nutanix to Azure Cloud. Nutanix has removed all limitations and we can continue to innovate and successfully navigate our digital transformation roadmap!”
