OneNeck Provides Customer Confidence with Backup-as-a-service powered by Nutanix Objects
Nutanix provides a data storage cloud for any storage type and any use case. OneNeck provides cloud like backup-as-a-service leveraging Nutanix Objects for simplicity of management, secure data retention and control and scale from very small to truly massive to meet their multi-tennant needs. Listen in to learn why OneNeck standardized on Nutanix and how Nutanix Objects has enabled them to provide better backup services to their customers.
INDUSTRY
Solutions Provider
BENEFITS
- Flexible hyperconverged infrastructure helps services provider boost business agility and get products to market faster
- One-click management via single pane of glass provides consistent administration
- Nutanix Objects supports scalable, simplified backup and recovery services
SOLUTION
- Nutanix Cloud Platform
- Nutanix Objects
- Nutanix Calm
- Nutanix Files
- Nutanix Prism management solution
BUSINESS BENEFITS
OneNeck IT Solutions is dedicated to helping customers balance the strategic responsibility of technological innovation against the need for daily operational excellence. As its name suggests, accountability is key to OneNeck’s mission, and the solutions provider is constantly enhancing its infrastructure to get services to market faster and deliver the highest level of availability. To continue to accelerate innovation, OneNeck deployed a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) based on Nutanix Cloud Platform. Together with Nutanix Objects, the scalable platform enables the provider to quickly roll out and deliver attractive service offerings to its customers, including its ReliaCloud® Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) offering, managed via a single consistent interface.
Pivoting to Nutanix Objects has allowed us to embrace all the benefits that we saw for general virtualization and compute environments. Nutanix lets us take advantage of a consistent management interface, scale easily, and grow without complexity
– John Hein, Product Director, OneNeck IT Solutions
CHALLENGE
With nearly 550 employees nationwide, OneNeck's team of technology professionals manage secure, world-class, hybrid IT infrastructures and applications for businesses around the country. “Our solutions fit both sides of the buying paradigm, whether CapEx or OpEx-based,” said John Hein, Product Director, OneNeck IT Solutions. “We offer a broad portfolio of cloud services, including public and private clouds that we operate, as well as managed services inclusive of most major operating systems, networking infrastructure, databases, and ERP applications. We have also offered backup services for decades.”
OneNeck’s ReliaCloud hosted private cloud solutions are a cornerstone of its service offerings. To ensure that its offerings could continue to support customers’ most demanding workloads, OneNeck launched an initiative to refresh its existing three-tier ReliaCloud architecture from the ground up. The firm soon realized that a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) could provide superior agility, flexibility, and scalability, all brought together under a single unified management platform.
SOLUTION
After an exhaustive evaluation of top HCI providers, OneNeck migrated to Nutanix Cloud Platform. Nutanix enables OneNeck to integrate all its resources into a single appliance, delivering cost savings, predictable scalability, and more flexible service delivery capabilities.
“One thing we really like about the Nutanix platform is the ability to leverage web scale architecture, providing us with software-defined infrastructure solutions and the ability to leverage commodity hardware without vendor lock-in,” said Hein. “We have been driving toward two major goals with this platform. We are taking a second look at how we deliver services and focusing in on the customer experience.”
OneNeck relies on Nutanix to support its ReliaCloud backup-as-a-service (BaaS), a resilient, cloud-based backup and recovery service. With Nutanix Objects, customers can take advantage of simple, flexible, S3-compatible object storage that is compatible with many popular backup applications. The solution is deployed and managed from a single pane of glass within Nutanix Prism.
Nutanix Calm has also become a core piece of the OneNeck architecture to support its services portfolio.
“For expediency of service delivery, we are very excited about leveraging Calm, with its automated workflows,” said Hein. “Its agility has already delivered significant benefits.”
In constructing our next generation cloud platform, we prioritized development of a service catalog that contains over 160 blueprints that we leverage during our customer onboarding phase. Those blueprints of operating systems, applications, and databases assist us in the reduction of deployment times, and the number of team members involved. One of the largest successes has come for our SQL server deployment time, less than 20-minutes start to finish vs. several hours and multiple administrators involved.
RESULTS
With its new infrastructure platform and Nutanix Objects, OneNeck has gained the ability to easily grow and extend its services to meet escalating customer needs and do it in a simplified way.
“When it comes to managing a large backup infrastructure, scalability is one of the top problems you encounter in serviceability,” said Hein. “Nutanix Objects frees us from the single, monolithic storage platform that made scalability a complex task for us.”
Nutanix Objects also helps the provider streamline operations, enabling OneNeck to dramatically reduce OpEx and keep pace in a very competitive environment. The organization initially moved approximately 3.5 Petabytes of backup data utilizing Nutanix Objects. OneNeck also leveraged Nutanix Foundation Central to support deployment of five U.S. data centers, saving hours per build.
“In terms of our ability to be competitive in the marketplace, Nutanix Objects represents a significant delta in better cost of the platform, so we are really excited to bring this offering to our customers,” said Hein.
With Nutanix Objects, OneNeck also gains new granular control in scale and performance tuning, to align its offerings to customer needs. “We want to present Objects as a storage to our customers and allow them to consume it using any S3-compatible solution. Nutanix lets us give customers the option of bringing their own backup solutions, or set up our service as a secondary or tertiary target for other backup operations coming off their legacy big appliances that need that place to write to.”
OneNeck has not only leveraged Objects as a replacement storage target for back operations, but has also productized Nutanix Objects as S3-API compatible cloud storage target, providing support for a variety of use cases. Any application that can support an S3-API compatible storage target could leverage this service platform.
Nutanix also provides support for multitenancy capabilities, such as sequestered security zones and resources, all residing on a single platform. “One of the things we were attracted to with Nutanix is its multitenancy capabilities,” said Hein. “It has really accelerated our ability to bring new features and new services to market in a multitenancy consumption model.”
OneNeck is continuing to augment its infrastructure to take full advantage of the capabilities of its Nutanix platform. For example, the firm is evaluating Nutanix Files to support flexible, scalable file storage services for customers. “I’m excited about Nutanix Files,” said Hein. “Because both Files and Objects are storage-centric solutions, they are being productized for our customers’ consumption on a nearly parallel path. They can be procured through resale and professional services for implementation and consulting or offered via an as-a-service offering for those that prefer the OpEx approach. We will be offering customers dedicated clusters for Files and Objects.”
Files was launched as a complete product offering by OneNeck in Q4 of 2020. This includes Private Cloud File Deployments, a public cloud pay-as-you-go model for files, and also the ability to support managed customer-owned infrastructure running Nutanix Files.
OneNeck is already starting to see success with customers by leveraging a hybrid approach to File services. The company offers Nutanix Files as a service from OneNeck, deployed next to Private Cloud Nutanix Clusters within the same data center. This provides the benefits of pay-as-you-go scale and service delivery, while allowing the customer’s server virtualization clusters to be sized without overhead of a large file services.
With its highly agile, scalable Nutanix solution in place, OneNeck is confident in its ability to continue to outpace competitors and meet changing client demands in the years to come.