END USER INSIGHT
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.
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.
Since the full installation was completed,
the company has put the promised
scalability to the test by adding additional
nodes to cope with growing IT demands.
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. “The Enterprise Cloud
delivered fully on its promise of cloud-like
www.intelligentdatacentres.com
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 GSCCO
workloads leaving just a handful of
“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. ◊
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