Nutanix Enables Verint to Thrive in a Competitive IT Solutions Market

Business Benefits

With the simplicity and performance of the Nutanix platform, Verint’s IT and R&D teams are now able to deliver new projects to the market much faster. They have also gained the ability to non-disruptively upgrade all infrastructure in a fraction of the time it took on the 3-tier platform, and have reduced datacenter footprint and co-lo costs—despite doubling the number of workloads running on the Nutanix systems.BART wanted to create a new private cloud environment that was easy to manage and scale, refresh its BART police application infra-structure, and add a new DR location.

Industry

• Software and hardware solutions and services

Solution

• Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform
• Acropolis Software
  
• AHV
• Nutanix Prism Management
• Splunk Enterprise, Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, Enterprise Applications Workloads

Challenges

• Legacy data center infrastructure was aging and difficult to manage
• Procuring separate systems from three different infrastructure vendors was costly and time-consuming
• Managing the large number of physical servers needed for Splunk was challenging
• Software upgrades were complex and disruptive, resulting in downtime and delays for critical IT and R&D projects

Verint Systems provides software and hardware solutions for customer engagement and management, security, surveillance, and business intelligence. Over 10,000 organizations in more than 180 countries leverage Verint’s artificial intelligence and advanced analytics technology to unlock the potential of automation and intelligence to drive real business impact across their organizations.

“We were experiencing a lot of the same pain points as every other enterprise using 3-tier infrastructure,” explained Cyrille Valery, Verint’s IT director. “Our IT team was spending far too much time managing all of the separate servers, storage systems, and networking infrastructure. We had to purchase and update every component separately, negotiate contracts with three different vendors, and coordinate installations and upgrades across all of the disparate platforms. Not only was it a big headache to manage, it was also very expensive to scale, since we had to buy everything at once when we needed to expand.”

Solution

Verint started investigating newer infrastructure options in 2017. “We began our search by looking at Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Hyperconverged Infrastructure, and noticed that Nutanix was listed as a leader in that market,” noted Valery. “Another reason we chose Nutanix was the flexibility it provides. In addition to offering AHV, its own, full-featured hypervisor, Nutanix provides the ability to run other hypervisors as well. We have already moved 80% of our workloads over to AHV, but 20% are still on vSphere. We’ll be moving the remainder of those workloads to AHV eventually, it’s just a timing issue for us. It’s great that Nutanix gives us the ability to migrate over only when it’s right for us.”

Customer Outcome

Running Splunk on Nutanix

Verint deployed its first Nutanix systems for Splunk in 2017. Splunk Enterprise is the leading software platform for unleashing the power of machine data gathered from IT infrastructure and equipment of all types. With the amount of machine data increasing exponentially, managing the Splunk environment had become a serious challenge for Verint’s data team.

“We were relying on a large number of physical servers for our growing Splunk installation,” explained Dan DiCicco, IT Architect at Verint Systems. “It was very difficult to manage all of those separate servers, but they were needed for indexing. We moved to Nutanix because it was as close as possible to a physical set up from a performance perspective, without all of the operational headaches.” “Traditional IT infrastructure is not well-suited to address the needs of growing Splunk installations,” added Valery. “Nutanix Enterprise Cloud brings the operational efficiencies of virtualization to Splunk, while ensuring top performance for our I/O-intensive workloads. Nutanix has delivered an extremely scalable, high-performance search and indexing platform for our transaction-heavy Splunk workloads.”

Moving VDI and Enterprise Apps to Nutanix

The great success of the Splunk project motivated Verint’s CIO to move the company’s mission-critical Citrix VDI environment and enterprise applications over to Nutanix as well. “We have a very large R&D team comprised of approximately 1,400 professionals, and many of them are working remotely using Citrix virtual desktops,” explained Valery. “With VDI on Nutanix, it’s very easy to spin up and integrate our new acquisitions, improving the productivity of our remote teams. The virtual desktops are also enabling us to implement BYOD, extending the life of some of our older laptops by using them as dumb terminals.” 

Launching New PCI and HIPAA Compliance Initiatives

By moving to Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, Verint has been able to launch a series of new PCI and HIPAAcompliant offerings to its customers. “We wouldn’t have come close to meeting our target dates for that compliance project if we were still running on the 3-tier environment,” DiCicco shared. “With our increased efficiency and new PCI and HIPAA offerings, we’ve been able to expand our market share, drive amazing customer experiences, deepen customer loyalty, and enhance our business performance.” 

Fast Deployments for Data Center Expansion

To accommodate rapid growth in customer demand, Verint purchased additional Nutanix nodes for its US, Europe, and Israel datacenters in mid-2018. “Deploying new infrastructure is definitely easier with Nutanix – it’s essentially a plug and play solution,” said DiCicco. “With hyperconverged infrastructure, there are far fewer systems to deploy and cables to connect. It only takes a few hours to get everything operational with Nutanix. We can also buy just one node of Nutanix at a time as we grow, instead of having to make the bulk purchases that were required with our legacy systems. It is much easier to budget and plan for expansion on the hyperconverged platform.”

Non-Disruptive Upgrades

“System upgrades were always very time-consuming with our legacy infrastructure,” admitted DiCicco. “Software and hardware upgrades would take weeks, and we’d have to take our systems offline. In order to avoid disruptions, we would frequently postpone upgrades. With Nutanix, we can upgrade everything non-disruptively. No more system downtime or outages for upgrades means our R&D and IT teams can complete their projects on time.”

Reduced Datacenter Footprint and Power

Verint was also able to cut its datacenter space in half at its colo facility, even though they nearly doubled the number of workloads. “In addition to cutting our co-lo costs for rackspace, we reduced our ongoing cooling and heating costs as well,” said DiCicco.

Great Technical Support

“Nutanix tech support is really great,” admitted Valery. “With our other software vendors, we have to go through multiple tiers of support before our problems solved. With Nutanix, we’re immediately connected with someone who can answer our questions and resolve our issues. It has eliminated all of the frustration and excessive time our team was spending with other tech support organizations.”

Next Steps

With the great success of its Splunk and VDI deployments, Verint is now planning to move additional workloads over to Nutanix and finish the migration from vSphere to Nutanix AHV. “Nutanix Enterprise Cloud has enabled us to streamline our IT infrastructure management and create a modern datacenter that meets the HIPAA and PCI compliance requirements of our customers. By moving to Nutanix, we can now compete on – and win – many more client projects than before,” concluded Valery.