TBConsulting Partners with Nutanix for Rapidly Expanding VDI Environment

Business Needs

Needed a higher-performing storage solution that would provide the ability to scale quickly in order to meet increasing customer demand.

Solution

• Nutanix NX-3460 systems
• Nutanix Prism management solution

Benefits

• Gained the ability to quickly scale VDI to >4,000 desktops in weeks, rather than months, with the previous infrastructure
• Reduced the effort to maintain the desktop environment by 5x
• Obtained a 4x reduction in footprint compared to traditional infrastructure solution

Challenge

TBConsulting has been providing high quality managed IT services to clients in the Southwestern region of the United States for over 20 years. As a result of its excellent reputation, demand for services has been escalating. “What led us to Nutanix was the ability to provide exponential growth for our clients,” explained Dieter Gable, CEO of TBConsulting. “One of our largest healthcare clients posed the question, ‘If we were to grow by 10x in a very short period of time, how fast could you respond?’ We wanted the answer to be ‘very fast.”

TBConsulting used a 3-tier infrastructure platform before moving to Nutanix. “It was a very traditional set up,” noted Gable. “We were buying a lot of EMC storage systems and HP blades. It was a homegrown solution, pieced together with Cisco components, using VMware ESXi and Horizon View for the virtual desktop environment.”

As a result of the complexity of the 3-tier environment, there was room for improvement in deployment time. “Acquiring all of the new equipment, configuring it, and getting it ready for use always took several months,” Gable reported. “We vetted several best-in-class vendors, and came away with the clear impression that Nutanix had the best solution for our fast-growth, VDI use case.”

Solution

TBConsulting started its journey with Nutanix by purchasing twenty-four NX-3060 systems for a healthcare client last year. That client is now being serviced out of two data centers in the Southwest. Due to compliance requirements, TBConsulting is adding a 32-node DR cluster to the current footprint and will be replicating from Phoenix to San Diego, using Nutanix asynchronous replication for the master images.

TBConsulting has now deployed over 4,000 virtual desktops for this healthcare customer, used by its call center agents at 12 different locations across the United States. “Nutanix was able to design a solution that fits our client’s current needs, and also enables us to scale the environment easily for both production and DR as they onboard additional VDI users.”

Working with Nutanix

“One of the big differentiators with Nutanix is the easy access to highly trained personnel.” Gable said. “We were able to sit down with the Nutanix engineering team and walk through our use case, our images, and our utilization needs, and come up with the best machine configuration for our large healthcare customer. Other vendors rarely take the time to evaluate our needs after the initial sale, they just tell us to buy more memory, more chips, or more blades if we have any issues. That approach is very inefficient and costly, and doesn’t always solve our problems. We have a very open and honest relationship with Nutanix. When they perform a health check on our environment, they show us a dashboard where we can clearly see if we need more infrastructure—and if so how much we need.”

Results

FASTER ROLLOUTS

Working with Nutanix, TBConsulting delivered new desktops to the healthcare provider in just a few weeks, compared to the months that it would have taken with the previous 3-tier solution. “We received excellent feedback from our customer about the speed of the rollout,” Gable said. “We were able to meet their needs by partnering with Nutanix.”

SIMPLIFIED MANAGEMENT

“The Nutanix systems have streamlined our management process,” Gable reported. “Now, with our expertise in Nutanix, we’re able to roll out day-today operations of a project to standard operating center personnel for management, leveraging our highly trained designers and development engineers to focus on top-tier level services.”

Before moving from the traditional 3-tier environment to Nutanix, the VDI environment consisted of only 600 virtual desktops. Since moving to Nutanix, it is now over 4,000 desktops. “By partnering with Nutanix, we’re able to maintain the 4,000 desktop environment on Nutanix with less effort than 600 seats on our traditional infrastructure required.”

FOOTPRINT AND POWER SAVINGS

“As a managed service provider, we are always focused on driving down costs,” Gable said. “Nutanix takes far less rack space. We were able to replace a lot of EMC, HP, and Cisco gear with just one Nutanix box. If we had expanded to 4,000 desktops using traditional infrastructure, I’m estimating it would have taken 4x the amount of space compared to Nutanix. Saving money is what allows us to remain competitive in the service provider market space.”

Next Steps

TBConsulting’s Nutanix footprint has now grown to well over 100 nodes. In addition to providing desktops as a service (DaaS), they also provide a robust and mature DR as a service (DRaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), leveraging multiple enterprise grade tools including native Nutanix. TBConsulting also has established a footprint in Las Vegas and several other locations throughout the US at Switch Data Centers using the Nutanix infrastructure.

“It’s very hard to argue with the Nutanix approach,” Gable concluded. “Anyone who argues against hyperconverged architectures probably also argued against virtualization when it first came out, and then had to come back and say, ‘Okay fine, it’s sticking around—I guess we’ll virtualize our environment now.’ Hyperconverged technology lead by Nutranix equips TBConsulting with industry-leading web scale infrastructure powering our best-in-class service. This means we can focus on our client’s next strategic initiative—DR, DevOps, Copy Data Management, Cyber Security, Business Alignment, Cloud Strategy, Process Automation, and much more.”