CASE STUDY
plus storage hardware in its data centre.
With three port terminals operations to
manage the company was also keen to
migrate to a solution that would integrate
management of all physical and virtual
resources through a single interface as well
as provide tools to enhance the resiliency of
its IT infrastructure.
“We wanted a solution that would deliver
linear scalability to handle predicted rapid
growth in container traffic,” said Hossam
El-Masry, Information Technology Manager
at GSCCO.
“We were also looking for greater resiliency
and the ability to upgrade and manage
the infrastructure without any downtime
or impact in any way on the level of service
provided to staff and customers at the ports
we manage.”
SOLUTION
Following a comprehensive evaluation
of hyper-converged solutions from a
number of vendors, the team at GSCCO
decided on Nutanix Enterprise Cloud with
implementation in two phases.
The first involved installation of a primary
Enterprise Cloud cluster in the GSCCO data
centre, followed by virtualisation of as many
server workloads as possible then subsequent
decommissioning of the legacy hardware
once the new software and client workloads
were fully operational.
“The Enterprise Cloud delivered fully on its
promise of cloud-like scalability, enabling
us to add additional nodes in hours rather
than days or even weeks with the old
hardware, and with no downtime,” he said.
“We now also have a much more resilient
infrastructure,” he continued, “allowing us to
keep the ports running at all times with no
disruption in service during maintenance and
rapid failover to our recovery site to enable
us to keep the ports working should we suffer
a power outage or other problem.”
CUSTOMER OUTCOME
As part of the migration to the Nutanix
Enterprise Cloud, El-Masry and his team
have virtualised all of the GCSSO workloads
leaving just a handful of legacy systems
with specific hardware dependencies.
This has led to a significant increase in
performance and greater capacity. It has
also allowed the port operator to reduce
rack occupancy by a full 1.5 racks, in
turn, leading to a significant reduction in
associated power and cooling overheads.
The support team, too, has benefited by
being able to manage the two sites and all
physical and virtual resources from the one
Nutanix Prism console. Moreover, the support
team no longer need specialist storage
management skills and are able to spend
more time supporting users and planning for
further developments than struggling to just
keep the data centre working.
“Not only have we saved on capital IT
spending, we have also achieved a saving
of around 15% in terms of OpEx,” said El-
Masry. “We’ve also been able to bring new
developments online earlier than planned
including recent major upgrades to our Navis
N4 Terminal Operating System and EmPower
employee performance management
systems needed to cope with the extra
container traffic expected going forward.”
NEXT STEPS
In the short term it’s business as usual with
El-Masry and his team focused on further
expanding the Enterprise Cloud deployment
to cope with continued growth. Looking to the
future the company is evaluating possible use
of public cloud services, process automation
and support for the Internet of Things (IoT)
and is doing so confident in the knowledge
that the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud is uniquely
equipped to enable them to take advantage
of these and other new technologies and do
so at minimal risk and expense. n
The second phase required the building of a
Disaster Recovery facility at the company’s
Jeddah Islamic Port location equipped with
a second Enterprise Cloud cluster to be used
for snapshot replication, backup and Disaster
Recovery using tools included as standard in
the Nutanix software stack.
The full installation was completed in late
2016, since then the company has put the
promised scalability to the test by adding
additional nodes to cope with growing IT
demands in each of the following years.
With the previous infrastructure this would
have required weeks of planning to cope with
the disruption and possible downtime that
would have ensued but, with the Nutanix
Enterprise, it was a quick, seamless and
trouble free exercise, as El-Masry confirms.
www.intelligentcio.com
WE SIMPLY COULDN’T HAVE HANDLED
THE RECENT MASSIVE GROWTH IN
CONTAINER TRAFFIC WITHOUT IT.
INTELLIGENTCIO
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