Straive Adopted Multi-Cloud Strategy to Scale Operations 3x faster with Nutanix

Maximize the business value & reduce overheads by 20% with a hybrid multi-cloud environment

Overview

Straive’s accelerated growth trajectory and high-performance requirements necessitated upgrading its three-tier infrastructure. The IT infrastructure was complex and unable to offer the scale, agility, and speed that are imperative for business success. Therefore, Straive adopted the Nutanix Cloud Platform aligned with modern-day IT requirements. Straive now delivers better on its ambitious multi-cloud objectives, transitioning workloads easily from on-premises to private and public clouds. Among the many benefits, IT can also add capacity 3x faster than before, run applications quicker, and has been able to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) by 20%.

Challenge

Straive, headquartered in Singapore, is a global leader in content technology solutions. We offer data services, subject matter expertise (SME), and technology solutions to our clients in multiple domains, such as Research Content, eLearning/EdTech, and Data/Information providers. We have a client base scoping 30 countries worldwide.

The company is growing, with more than 17,000 employees in 20 delivery centers, including the Philippines, India, Vietnam, Nicaragua, the US, and the UK. Straive’s rapid growth needs high-performance IT infrastructure to overcome data silos, segregated storage, and networking impediments. Sitaram Dhuri, associate vice president of IT at Straive, says, “Our ambitious growth plans mandate accelerated provision of applications and quick onboarding of new projects.”

He continues, “Thus, we needed to find ways to overcome downtimes, lengthy maintenance windows, and last-mile troubleshooting inefficiencies that multiple vendor support usually brings.”

Solution

Straive kick-started a project to overhaul its IT and move to a simpler and more flexible architecture. It began looking for a solution to support a hybrid multi-cloud cloud strategy, where workloads could be easily managed and moved from on-premises to different private and public clouds.

The company engaged with Nutanix and learned that its Cloud Platform met the business requirements. Comments Dhuri, “Nutanix was a proven technology, recommended by industry peers and leading tech analysts. We liked the simplified management, the flexible scaling, and openness, helping us reduce our hypervisor costs.”

Straive deployed the Nutanix Cloud Platform, starting with two clusters implemented at data centers in Chennai and Pondicherry in India. It migrated its home-grown tier-one applications to Nutanix before adding more applications and increasing the number of clusters. Today, all Microsoft SQL Server databases, the content management system, Adobe InDesign software, and other business applications are running those clusters in India and Nicaragua.

The Nutanix solution comprises AOS Storage with license-free AHV Virtualization helping remove complexity. Since day one, IT personnel have used Prism for one-click infrastructure management. They have added Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) to create a simpler, faster, and more cost-effective hybrid multi-cloud environment.

“NC2 is helping IT align with our strategy,” says Dhuri. “Our Nutanix ITAM [Inside Technical Account Manager] helped us, ensuring we followed best practices, and now we can move workloads from on-prem to the AWS public cloud and vice versa easily.”

Customer Outcome

Delivers on hybrid multi-cloud IT strategy

Straive can easily switch workloads from on-premises to private and public clouds using NC2 without needing re-architecting. As a result, the company can be more agile, particularly when launching new projects. “Predominantly, we’re using the NC2 to quickly set up DR [disaster recovery] for client projects,” says Dhuri, “but we’re planning to use NC2 for other workloads soon.”

Triples the speed of adding new capacity

At a time when the company is seeing demand for its solutions increasing, it can respond quickly to new opportunities. “Nutanix has enabled us to add capacity at least three times faster than with our legacy platform,” comments Dhuri.

Employees access applications faster

The impact of the move to Nutanix is being felt across the entire organization. Personnel can access the applications they need to do their work more quickly. This means greater productivity and increased satisfaction, with staff feeling that IT is meeting their requirements proactively.

Reduces IT TCO by 20%

The management team is pleased with the adoption of Nutanix as it helped to decrease overheads cost. Straive experienced a 20% TCO reduction, thanks to Nutanix, aligning IT with the organization’s broader strategic goals and reducing expenses.

Improves critical application uptime by 20%

Staff can also focus more on tasks in hand now that downtime has been cut significantly. The inbuilt redundancy with Nutanix means critical workloads are better protected from failures, and overall uptime has been improved by 20%.

Reduces data recovery time by hours

Tests have shown that in the event of any downtime, Straive can respond faster, reducing the impact on productivity. Comments Dhuri, “We’ve improved DR, lowering our RTO [recovery time objective] and RPO [recovery point objective] by hours.”

Boosts IT efficiency

The Nutanix Cloud Platform has also reduced management time, freeing the IT team from troubleshooting and routine management tasks. For instance, with Prism and its unified management console, team members can manage and monitor both on-premises and cloud infrastructures. The time they gain is used for higher-value work, responding to requests from across the organization on time, and offering granular support.

Next Steps

Looking ahead, Straive is planning to expand its NC2 implementation to help IT manage and monitor the growing number of on-premises, private, and public cloud environments. The company is also planning to deploy Nutanix Files for software-defined, scale-out file storage for its large quantities of unstructured data.