Business Needs
Automating management and increasing IT efficiency as the company grows in terms of the size and complexity.
Solution
Nutanix NX-6000 Series
Benefits
- Nutanix contributed in reducing rack space from 75U to 15U.
- Improving application performance by 50-100%
- Cutting datacenter costs, simplifying management, improving service quality, and enabling non-disruptive system maintenance and upgrades.
Challenges
NTT DATA, established in 1988, has been able to expand its IT operations to 42 regions and 180 cities worldwide.
NTT DATA’s Systems Operation Group is in charge of maintenance and operation of all internal information systems. The corporation’s previous IT environment had consisted of 35 servers, 6 network storage systems, and approximately 100 guest virtual machines.
“We had several different server types, specifications, and operating systems,” noted Koichi Okuno, Manager of System Management Group. “Due to inadequate performance of the previous infrastructure, we used to limit the number of employees permitted to login to their desktops in each division or group. We needed to find a better solution that would enable us to achieve higher performance, automated system control, and more efficient operations, as well as lowering power consumption and IT cost reduction.”
Solution
NTT DATA compared several server and storage options along with the Nutanix solution. “We decided to narrow our research in terms of web-scale and hyperconverged infra- structure,” said Yusaku Nakajima. “As an IT department of a leading company in the technology industry, our business model is to adopt cutting edge technology for our in-house system, and then propose these solutions to our clients, using our experience as a model case.”
One of the criteria for selecting a new solution was simplicity of deployment. “The proposed Nutanix system configuration was so simple, I was very surprised,” recalled Koichi Okuno. “The Nutanix appliances were easy to deploy, requiring only a few clicks to configure system settings. We did not experience this with our other systems.”
The second criteria was the simplicity of operation and management. “We needed a solution that could be managed by employees without any specialized IT skills just by following the manual,” emphasized Nakajima. “Nutanix enables us to assign higher- level experts to do other things, including designing new services for the purpose of increasing our IT capabilities. It’s a ‘transformation by IT’ approach into action”.
The third reason NTT DATA selected Nutanix was its higher performance. “In addition to the use of advanced technology as a model case, Nutanix enables us to reduce operational load through greater efficiency and the automation of system operation,” said Koichi Okuno.
We will now be introducing the benefits of the Nutanix solution to our clients, demonstrating the outstanding functionality we have verified with our in-house deployment.
Yusaku Nakajima, Senior Manager, IT Management Office
Results
By moving to Nutanix, NTT DATA was able to reduce rack space from 75U to 15U, cutting the costs of datacenter space and power. Reduction in management load was also achieved through server consolidation, and the number of managed guest virtual machines has also been reduced. “With Nutanix, all nodes can be shared into a single virtual pool,” said Koichi Okuno. “In the past, 35 servers and 6 storage devices were managed individually. By using the Nutanix Prism integrated management interface, we are able to manage everything centrally, reducing our management burden.”
Nutanix has also helped NTT DATA improve service quality. “Our operators in our management section, have remotely maintained servers located in datacenters from domestic and overseas offices.” said Satoru Okuno, Deputy Manager of System Management Group. “They can’t work without these environments. In the past, cumbersome adjustments were necessary for PC operating system updates, but this troublesome step has been completely eliminated with Nutanix. The approximate 5x improvement in disk I/O performance has been achieved. The display response of our business applications, such as word processing and spreadsheet software, has improved by 50-100%.”
Through these improvements, NTT DATA’s goal of reducing 15% of operational work- loads for their corporate information system has been achieved. “The contribution of Nutanix to this reduction was very significant,” noted Koichi Okuno. When asked to evaluate Nutanix, Satoru Okuno added, “I think it comes down to the word ‘easy.’ Deployment was easy and ongoing operation is easy.” “We wanted to confirm that even employees without any special IT skills were able to perform maintenance and operation of our infrastructure. This is entirely possible with Nutanix,” reported Nakajima.
Next Steps
NTT DATA’s IT Management Office is actively incorporating new technology with the goal of implementing a transformation by IT approach, and Nutanix is contributing to the expansion of our group’s business worldwide. “Nutanix is enabling us to provide greater value to all of our clients. We will introduce the benefits of the Nutanix solution to our clients, demonstrating the outstanding functionality we have verified with our in-house deployment,” Nakajima concluded.