CASE STUDY
T However, they were introduced to Nutanix
HCI by Service Services (Mauritius) Ltd
(SSML), which pioneered the solution.
Backed by 65 years of experience and the
combined expertise of five district business
entities, the Mauritius Union Group offers
customised and tailor-made solutions. Nutanix enables IT teams to build and
operate powerful multi-cloud architectures,
with its Enterprise Cloud OS software
providing a single point of control to
manage IT infrastructure and applications
at any scale.
he Mauritius Union Group operates
within the financial services industry,
specialising in insurance, corporate
pension schemes, investment and loans.
The company first looked at
hyperconvergence as an alternative to
continual investment into siloed and
three-tiered legacy systems because of
needs to consistently integrate the legacy
environments from merges and acquisitions
over the last 10 years.
Its solutions are also 100% software-
based and are built on the industry’s most
popular hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI)
technology, delivering a full infrastructure
stack that integrates compute, virtualisation,
storage, networking and security to power
any application.
The software runs across different cloud
environments to harmonise IT operations and
bring frictionless mobility to all applications.
“We tested the Communication Edition on
Nutanix cloud then built our own cluster and
conducted a POC before going ahead with
the project,” said Rishi Sewnundun, Head of
IS at the Mauritius Union Group.
“Deploying Nutanix was a simple, out-of-the-
box experience; it was just so easy to deploy
and now subsequently to manage, as a
result of Nutanix Prism.
“We completed installation of the
Community Edition on three nodes within
one day and, two days later, the Cisco UCS
WITH NUTANIX, IT HAS BECOME
EASIER TO SET UP HIGH AVAILABILITY
APPLICATIONS AND HANDLE
FAILURES SEAMLESSLY WITHOUT
ANY DISRUPTIONS.
www.intelligentcio.com
failures seamlessly without any disruptions.
We are now able to complete box-to-box
synchronous replication of VMs, as opposed
to the multiple products we used in the past
to achieve the same result.”
The move to a web-scale environment
enabled the Mauritius Union Group to
streamline its highly virtualised environment,
as well as alleviate the bandwidth pressures
it was feeling on its network. Furthermore,
with Nutanix the company has been
able to improve performance and reduce
management complexity.
“We initially investigated myriad offerings
on the market from various vendors
after extensive testing of these various
technologies, we realised that Nutanix
Acropolis hypervisor (AHV) performed
exceptionally well in many areas than its
peers and was the obvious choice,” added
Sewnundun. “Migration from XenServer
to AHV was also smooth, sometimes with
minimal modification to the OVA file.”
The Enterprise Cloud OS software has been
built on Cisco UCS, a standard hardware in
its offices in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and
Rwanda. Furthermore, the IT team from
the Mauritius Union Group makes use of
the Nutanix Prism dashboard, which has
streamlined its view of the infrastructure into
a single interface, saving it from the multiple
appliance consoles and system dashboards it
was reliant on in the past.
“We migrated over 50 VMs in just one week
with zero downtime and that included
the five IBM Domino mail servers for the
entire group,” said Sewnundun. “We also
immediately saw notable performance
improvements accessing the data centre
and log on times for the Citrix XenDesktop
environment, which was reduced by 14
seconds per session.”
cluster. Our time frame for the Nutanix HCI
was one month once the hardware was
delivered but in two weeks all the migration
from XenServer and VMware was completed. Leveraging the Acropolis Filesystem (AFS)
allowed the Mauritius Union Group to move
user profiles and shared files off its storage
environment, as well as build user specific
quotas, something it had wanted to do for
many years. The team has also been able to
improve its own VM and storage provisioning
service delivery thanks to Prism.
“With Nutanix, it has become easier to set
up high availability applications and handle “We have also seen a direct impact on our
Manex as we have been able to reduce the
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