Turning to Nutanix’ enterprise cloud solution for their production system in January 2014, Millennia has been able to harness a platform which leverages web-scale engineering and consumer-grade design to natively converge compute, virtualisation and storage into a resilient, software-defined solution with the result being an 83% RAM overhead saving across its disaster recovery capabilities. Millennia was one of the first MSPs to adopt Nutanix in the UK.
With many of Millennia’s customers handling terabytes of data and millions of transactions, the company sought a robust disaster recovery solution to replace the existing server and storage area network infrastructure in which disparate systems had led to frequent incompatibility and reliability issues which had proven to be time consuming to address.
On a tight budget, Millennia originally turned to a low cost Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) vendor, but the result was regular system failures which in the words of John Thorpe, Director, left the business ‘fighting’ to maintain a seamless customer service.
“It soon became very apparent that, when it comes to high availability, hyperconverged systems are not all made equal,” said Thorpe. “The low cost option simply wasn’t robust enough to cope with sensitive workloads such as SQL Server, as there was a risk of data corruption with maintenance often requiring downtime.”
As a result, a decision was made to replace the entire system with the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform. Underpinned by the same design principles and technologies that power IT innovators such as Google, Facebook and Amazon, the Nutanix solution builds on the personalised offering which has helped differentiate Millennia in a saturated and competitive market. Steady growth as a provider of IT cloud-enabled managed hosting has seen Millennia evolve from being part of a customer’s online presence to hosting their entire IT infrastructure, meaning the provision of a secure and agile platform has never been more critical.
“In my experience, the more you simplify, the greater the reliability. After just six weeks of the Nutanix solution being in place, I went from feeling very nervous when an alert showed up on the system, to becoming increasingly reassured. Which is how things should be in the enterprise field,” said Thorpe.
“The different way of measuring storage data reduction meant better planning was available with Nutanix as it was based on physical raw rather than assumed capacity.” The easy scalability of the modular building-block design, which enables organisations to start with small deployments that can grow incrementally into large cluster installations on a linear basis, has proven to be another major draw for Millennia.
“When we land a big customer, all I have to do is size them and then see how many extra nodes we need within the cluster. Furthermore, adding more and more to the infrastructure never compromises performance and we can price with a degree of certainty that we didn’t have before,” added Thorpe.
Paul Phillips, Senior Regional Director at Nutanix, stated: “Millennia’s journey with Nutanix exemplifies both the accessibility and impact that can be made in a short space of time with the enterprise cloud and the peace of mind it brings. It’s an approach which delivers what the modern data centre demands, where end users expect 100% application availability and reliable performance SLAs.”
