Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 83 | Page 58

COUNTRY FOCUS : UAE
Above : Muayad Fahmawi ,
IT Supervisor at Bunduq Below : Bunduq ’ s oil production platform
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 a challenging proposition for the company earlier , 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 .
Like the challenges with backups , the company also faced issues relating to database testing . With the earlier physical servers , sometimes it was necessary to copy the entire database which was 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 five 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 , management of 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 ,” said Fahmawi . “ In terms of upgrading and updating the server and drivers , earlier a big plan was needed – you had to individually upgrade the server drivers for example and the hypervisor . And of course , there was system downtime during the upgrades . But with Prism , it ’ s a one-click upgrade with no downtime .”
With the earlier infrastructure , the company had three racks in the data centre . Nutanix has helped with data centre consolidation , with a resulting 40 % estimated cost savings due to the data centre space reduced to half .
Commenting on the success of the project and how it will evolve in future , Fahmawi added : “ 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 replicating directly from Nutanix to Azure Cloud . Nutanix has removed all limitations and we can continue to innovate and successfully navigate our digital transformation roadmap .” p
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