FSB Technology Takes Early Advantage Of Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) On AWS For Rapid Rollout To New Markets
BUSINESS NEED
Having successfully replaced its outsourced IT infrastructure with a more agile, scalable and easy to manage Nutanix Cloud Platform, sports betting and iGaming specialist FSB Technology had become accustomed to bringing customers online to very tight timescales. In order to reach out to more geographically remote areas, however, and without compromising its ability to meet regulatory requirements at pace, the company would need to take a slightly different approach.
Key Results
| Rapid rollout from a distance |
Business as usual |
Ready for growth |
|---|---|---|
| 2 weeks to setup and configure a virtual datacentre compliant with regulatory gaming requirements with no need to find accommodation or local operational staff. | Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) running on AWS can share the same AHV workloads and be managed alongside on-premise clusters from the same Prism Central console. |
On demand scalability will allow even faster rollout of services to new customers in the same geolocation with no additional capital outlay or local presence. |
We’ve become used to tight deadlines, but less than a month to set up in an area where we had no presence at all looked unworkable. Then we learnt about Nutanix Cloud Clusters and, in just two weeks, had a Nutanix cluster up and ready for new business in the AWS public cloud. As well as meeting our immediate deadline, this allowed us to still meet geographic constraints and other local regulatory requirements plus it can run all our AHV workloads unchanged and be managed remotely alongside other, on-premise, deployments.
CHALLENGE
As a provider of high tech services behind some of the world's best known betting and gaming brands, FSB Technology is totally reliant on its IT to do business. With this in mind, the global supplier is laser focussed on offering clients a premium and highly available service which is why, in 2019, they upgraded their infrastructure to an on-premise Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure running the AHV hypervisor.
At the time, Andrew Jobson, Head of IT reported the results as “Nothing short of amazing!” with no negatives or downtime since going live with the new datacentres, now all based on the Nutanix infrastructure. Moreover, since then, FSB Technology has continued to grow and add to its Nutanix estate with, recently, two new deployments in Slovakia, one in Canada and another in South Dakota USA.
According to Jobson, the ability to manage this distributed global network centrally and scale resources rapidly are key benefits, as is the ease and speed with which new on-premise datacentres can be brought online. However, there are limits. Particularly when it comes to gaining regulatory approval, which can be a real hurdle to meeting deadlines, as he explains:
“The gaming regulators in many of the locations we cover require infrastructure to be local to the services provided. Hence why we opted for Nutanix and its on-premise solution which we can deploy rapidly and scale on-demand while still meeting strict compliance rules. But the further we go the harder it gets to maintain that pace, especially in areas where we have no existing presence and are effectively starting again from scratch."
SOLUTION
Fortunately for FSB Technology, plans for expansion beyond its existing boundaries were being finalised just as Nutanix was launching Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2), a product that enables the Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) stack and AHV hypervisor to be deployed on public cloud platforms. Ultimately expected to support all of the leading hyperscaler implementations, the first release is for Amazon Web Services (AWS) with FSB Technologies one of the first to sign up to this product and with immediate success.
“Once again it was nothing short of amazing,” confirmed Jobson. “It took just days to provision the AWS platform with Nutanix professional services helping my team configure the required Amazon EC2 i3 instances then install the Nutanix Cloud Clusters software remotely. That done, we simply needed to load up our application workloads and get them running using Prism Central, just as on any other Nutanix cluster on our network.”
CUSTOMER OUTCOME
Since going live, the new Cloud Clusters (NC2) implementation has fully lived up to expectation, both in terms of performance and availability.
“There have been no outages or, indeed, any problems at all,” commented Jobson. “It really is just like any other cluster on the network with no special skills required and the same exceptional level of support and knowledge available from Nutanix regardless of whether we’re talking about our on-premise clusters or this new one on AWS.”
Exact benefits are hard to calculate but with no need to source rack space, ship equipment or fly out staff to put it all together Jobson believes the savings in capital outlay were huge. Moreover, he is doubtful they would have been able to meet the original 4 week schedule, let alone do it in just two.
He also expects the Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) deployment to bring additional operational benefits going forward.
“We deliberately sized our AWS deployment to not cope not just with initial planned demand, but to get ready to host other customers in the same geolocation without the need for any further investment plus minimal overheads in terms of day to day running.”
NEXT STEPS
As well as taking advantage of its latest AWS deployment to attract and on-board new customers globally where it has no existing presence, Jobson sees the technology becoming a key part of wider hybrid multi-cloud strategy going forward.
“Because of the need to get regulatory approval, we will always need a hybrid infrastructure with some on-premise systems of our own,” he explains, “but there are huge benefits to be had from moving to the public cloud where possible and, thanks to Nutanix Cloud Clusters, that’s now a workable reality.”
Beyond that, Jobson and the team are looking to use Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on Microsoft Azure soon and also looking forward to NC2 becoming available on Google Cloud Platform as they believe this will further enhance the company’s ability to meet the needs of new customers and markets around the globe.
“Multicloud is definitely the way forward as it will enable us to choose the best platform to meet the needs of individual customers and different regulatory bodies. It also spreads the risks and, thanks to Nutanix Cloud Clusters, we can take full advantage of that multicloud approach with minimal outlay and hardly any disruption.”