Intelligent Data Centres Issue 08 | Page 49

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. ◊ Issue 08 49