Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) empowers German pension company to accelerate adoption of AWS with painless app migration, disaster recovery and more
Business Need
As part of its long-term hybrid multicloud strategy, Hamburger Pensionsverwaltung (HAPEV) had two pressing needs. The first was to find a suitable host for essential services required to support its new mission critical customer platform on AWS, but without the potential disruption and expense of moving wholesale to the Amazon environment. The second was to move forward with plans to strengthen disaster recovery for its on-premise datacentre hosting other essential business workloads on Nutanix Enterprise Cloud and AHV.
Key Results
| Quick time to value |
Simple unified management |
TCO reduction |
|---|---|---|
| Workloads simply migrated to AWS rather than re-architected - no re-tooling or re-skilling required, saving time and money. |
Single interface to manage business-critical hybrid multicloud infrastructure whether on-premise or hosted in public cloud. |
POC to live in under 3 months plus enhanced disaster recovery for on-premise datacentre, all at minimal cost. |
Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) has been a real game changer, allowing us to move crucial services needed on AWS in just a few hours rather than having to re-architect or replace them. At the same time, it has also enabled us to strengthen DR protection for all of our business-critical applications while simplifying management operations and, by leveraging existing skill sets, saving both time and money.
Challenge
One of the largest pension management providers in Germany, HAPEV is trusted to run the pension schemes of over 4,000 businesses from small start-ups to industry giants like Coca-Cola, EDEKA, Deichmann, Ferrero and others.
To keep pace with demand and grow the business the company had already embraced hybrid cloud technology, having modernised its on-premise datacentre with Nutanix Cloud Platform powered by Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) in 2018. But it didn’t stop there, with over a million individual pensions to manage and rising, the company had pressed ahead with the development of a new customer platform, using Kubernetes containers and other cloud-native technologies as part of a long term cloud-smart strategy.
The decision to host the new customer platform on AWS, however, presented the infrastructure team with a number of challenges as Alexander Milnikel, Principal Architect & Technical Lead at HAPEV, explains:
“To best support the new customer system we also needed to have a number of applications and services from our datacentre running in AWS, but that proved far from straightforward. Some were simply not supported on the Amazon platform while others needed extensive re-tooling in order to work properly. We would also need to retrain staff and get to grips with different management interfaces making it both a complex and costly approach.”
Solution
As an existing Nutanix customer and Nutanix Technology Champion, Milnikel was already waiting for the release of Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2), a solution which enables customers to run the same Nutanix software and AHV hypervisor they know on a public cloud platform such as AWS.
“It sounded like the ideal solution,” said Milnikel, “making it possible to just pick up existing applications and move them to AWS. Unfortunately, we had to then wait for it to be released but, the day that happened we were one of the first to start an intensive proof of concept (PoC) trial to find out what NC2 could do for us.”
That trial proved hugely successful, confirming not only that the workloads could be migrated and run on AWS without modification, but that they could be scaled to support expected growth and pass all necessary compliance and security tests. Equally, Milnikel and the team quickly established that NC2 could also be used to bolster DR protection with lower TCO for the company’s on-premise Nutanix infrastructure by replicating and failing over to the AWS cloud.
Customer Outcome
With all the boxes ticked during the trial, HAPEV management gave the green light to implementation, a process which took less than three months and completed with no major issues.
“It all went incredibly smoothly,” commented Milnikel, “More than that, we can manage NC2 with the same small IT team who treat it just like another Nutanix cluster, managed from the same Prism interface as our on-premise setup. In terms of performance, too, NC2 on AWS delivers exactly what we expected plus, of course, we got the same high level of support from Nutanix throughout making the whole project remarkably easy and stress free.”
Enhanced resiliency, now
Leveraging NC2 on AWS for disaster recovery in the Cloud made complete sense as it allowed HAPEV to take full advantage of the one-click failover/failback capabilities available in the Nutanix software stack.
“We saw it as a golden opportunity to bring our DR capabilities to another level,” he explained. “We had always planned to upgrade sometime but doing it on AWS as part of the customer project enabled us to do it sooner rather than later, giving us maximum protection for all our business-critical assets at minimal cost and effort. We can have a smaller footprint while replicating and scaling up to the number of nodes when needed to host the whole datacentre.”
Next Steps
In the medium term HAPEV is looking to migrate all of its on-premise workloads to the public cloud with ongoing efforts to, for example, reduce the number of VMs running in its on-premise datacentre by adopting SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) alternatives. It is also switching from further scaling of on-premise clusters to, instead, adding nodes to the Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) deployment on AWS to meet expected growth going forward.
“We’re really looking forward to Nutanix releasing Cloud Clusters (NC2) for Azure as this will open up even more possibilities,” he commented. “When that happens, we’ll be able to both spread the risks and choose the best platform for each workload, some on AWS, some on Azure but all deployed and managed using the same Nutanix console.”