CASE STUDY
More concerning however were the performance shortcomings of mission-critical applications such as ERP.“ No matter which environment this was running on, or where our end-users were based, the performance simply was not up to the mark,” said Gagandeep Singh Hoda, IT Manager at Al Dahra.
Analysis revealed that despite compute looking good, the number of IOPs in each environment was woefully short. Upgrading the storage devices, while a potential solution, would have been prohibitively expensive.
Presented with a pressing deadline to vacate their on-premises data centre, Hoda and his team had an urgent impetus to act.“ In just four weeks, we had to complete evaluation, procurement, deployment, and migration, a herculean feat by any measure.”
Solutions for modernisation
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Al Dahra is a prominent multinational provider in agribusiness, operating over 400 thousand acres of agricultural land in Egypt, Romania, Serbia, USA, and others. It is specialised in the cultivation, production and trading of up to 3 million tons of essential food commodities and up to 3 million tons of animal feed.
Serving a large customer base from commercial and governmental sectors, Al Dahra follows its purpose of sustainably feeding a growing world. The group has a widespread geographic footprint, operating in over 20 countries and catering to more than 40 markets.
A four-week deadline to migrate out of its UAE-based data centre presented a turning point for Al Dahra’ s IT team to consolidate multiple environments into a single cloud-hosted platform. The move not only met the original mandate, but brought significant performance and cost benefits that have enabled Al Dahra to operate more effectively.
Historical pain points
Al Dahra’ s IT infrastructure, built over time through expansions and acquisitions, was complex and challenging. Three distinct IT environments, namely Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2; VMware; and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, were running in its UAEbased data centre, and meant the usage of multiple sets of monitoring and backup tools. This was taking a daily toll on available IT resources.
Where others would have seen obstacles, Hoda – an optimist and overachiever – saw opportunity.“ Of our three environments, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure consistently performed best. At the same time, we enjoyed a strong partnership with AWS and were keen to maximise the cost benefits for which we were eligible.”
Since Nutanix Cloud Clusters were available on the AWS Marketplace, the choice was clear. Using the AWS Marketplace, the procurement process could not have been simpler.
“ We were able to utilise our existing AWS credits and with Nutanix Move, which was offered at no added cost, migrating all our applications was practically effortless,” said Hoda.
Nutanix Cloud Clusters on AWS provides hybrid cloud simplicity by extending on-premises workloads to AWS without any refactoring or any code changes to enterprise applications. Nutanix architecture gives the flexibility and freedom to move applications, workloads and software licenses wherever they are required.
Nutanix Cloud Clusters on AWS is an extension of the Nutanix Cloud Platform now running on AWS EC2 bare-metal instances. It replicates the core Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure software used for running on-premises workloads but now delivering the same virtualised, software-defined benefits in AWS with a unified management plane to manage workloads everywhere.
Nutanix Move enables automated migration to Nutanix Cloud Clusters on AWS from ESXi, Hyper-V, and other environments. Migrating to Nutanix Cloud Clusters alleviates re-platforming while enabling hybrid cloud
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