Skye Cloud Keeps On Growing With Nutanix

INDUSTRY

Cloud Service Provider

BENEFITS

• Increased performance and on-demand scalability from a hyper-converged infrastructure
• Reduced operational costs from reduced rack footprint and licence-free AHV hypervisor
• Single management interface for all physical and virtual resources requiring fewer specialist skills
• Enhanced fit for customers opting for a hybrid multicloud approach to IT

SOLUTION

• Nutanix Cloud Platform
• Prism Pro management plane
• Nutanix AHV hypervisor
• Veeam backup
• Nutanix Files
• Nutanix Flow

Applications

• Virtual customer workloads including
• Web servers
• Mail Servers
• Databases
• File sharing

CHALLENGES

With growth averaging 40% year-on-year, Skye Cloud has, in little over a decade, risen rapidly to become the UK’s best in class cloud service provider. Growth due partly to the strong relationships the company builds with its many high-profile clients but, equally, its use of market leading technologies to provide the fast, secure and reliable cloud services those customers expect.

During the last review of its infrastructure, however, it became clear that something more than a simple refresh was needed. Primarily to cope with further growth, but also adapt to changing patterns in demand, as James Bishop, Skye Cloud Director, explains:

“We had the usual mix of servers and SAN storage plus VMware for virtualisation which had served us well, but was becoming increasingly difficult to scale and manage as customer demand soared. Storage performance in particular was becoming a real concern along with  the escalating cost of provisioning, scaling and managing the infrastructure which was affecting our ability to compete against newer low-cost providers. It also lacked the flexibility to support customers taking a hybrid multicloud approach to IT and looking for greater synergy between our services, other public clouds and their own platforms.”

SOLUTION

Fortunately Bishop and his team were already well acquainted with Nutanix and its products having worked with a number of customers who had opted to deploy the Nutanix Cloud Platform on-premise as part of a hybrid multicloud solution.

“Having seen first-hand the performance, scalability and management benefits of deploying Nutanix at our customers, it made sense to see how these might translate to our own infrastructure,” he commented. “That meant spending time to, not just make sure it would meet our performance, scalability and availability needs, but crunch the numbers to see whether switching to Nutanix would have a positive impact on our overheads and profit margins.”

After much hard work the numbers turned out even better than anticipated, not least if the service provider opted to switch to the Nutanix AHV hypervisor included at no extra cost as part of the Nutanix software stack.

“There were big savings to be made by switching from the consumption model employed by VMware to the licence-free AHV hypervisor. Added to which we could also terminate the lease on our storage stack and further lower operational costs by simplifying the infrastructure, reducing its footprint and simplifying management. Overall we discovered we could actually end up breaking even, effectively recouping the installation costs from day one. An amazing result and, together with the performance, scalability and management advantages, hugely compelling.”

CUSTOMER OUTCOME

As part of the project to upgrade its core infrastructure, Skye Cloud also relocated the company’s existing primary datacentre from London to Maidstone with the first of the new Nutanix Cloud clusters installed at this new location. Workloads were then moved between the two, using the Nutanix Move tool to seamlessly migrate the existing VMware VMs to the AHV hypervisor.

A risk worth taking

“As a cloud service provider wholly dependent on our IT to do business, it was a big risk and it took a while to plan for and physically transfer workloads across,” commented Richard Ravenhill, Technical Director, “but it all went incredibly well, with no hitches. More than that, it was totally transparent to our customers with zero downtime and minimal involvement required on their part.”

Customers did, however, notice an immediate impact on performance – for the better! They have also reported faster turnaround when provisioning new virtual machines and a growing list of services. Benefits that Ravenhill puts down to reduced management overheads, with just one interface for him and his staff to get to grips with and far less expertise required to get the best out of the new platform.

“The results have been hugely positive,” confirmed Bishop. “Not only have we got a faster, more agile and reliable infrastructure, it’s already paid for itself and we still have 50% spare capacity going forward, without having to even think about investing further.”

Nutanix everywhere

A second cluster is being installed at the company’s Reading datacentre to be used both for load sharing plus active/active failover and disaster recovery. Other satellite sites in both the UK and abroad are, similarly, scheduled to be migrated to the new platform. The cloud service provider has also opted to use Veeam for backup which can be fully integrated with the Nutanix Cloud Platform and managed alongside other physical and virtual resources from the fully integrated Prism Pro management console.

NEXT STEPS

Short term, the plan is to continue to grow the business and add to the list of services Skye Cloud offers customers. Among these will be new products for those looking for geo-location compliance as well as an option for customers to use Nutanix Frame rather than Citrix to host virtual desktops. Beyond this Bishop and his team have also licensed Nutanix Files and Flow to better support and develop the company’s product portfolio going forward.

Longer term, Skye Cloud expects customers to further embrace hybrid multicloud working with one of its largest clients having already adopted Nutanix Clusters on AWS and others wanting to share other workloads across clouds. “There’s a definite move towards hybrid IT,” concluded Bishop, “and with Nutanix in our datacentres we’re ideally placed to make it work, both for us and our customers.”