Nutanix delivers hyper-convergence to top Swiss insurer

Nutanix has announced successful completion of the first phase of an infrastructure project for Swiss Insurance group, Vaudoise Assurances, one of the top ten biggest insurance companies in Switzerland. Planned, ultimately, to host hundreds of virtual machines, the Nutanix platform was chosen after an exhaustive proof-of-concept trial, which highlighted three strengths:
· High levels of instant compute and storage scalability;
· High availability afforded by unique Nutanix Metro Availability technology; and
· Consistently high levels of support and expertise exhibited by Nutanix and its partners.

Vaudoise Assurances needed to replace the end-of-life infrastructure deployed in its data centres with something more modern and capable. Running VMWare and hosting a mix of office productivity as well as business-critical production applications, it decided early on that hyper-convergence was the way forward but wanted to check out two of the leading solutions in a head-to-head trial before making any purchasing decisions.

“Having researched the market and understood the advantages, we were sure we wanted a hyper-converged platform,” explains Philippe Feijoo, Hosting and Virtualization Manager at Vaudoise Assurances, “but we needed to see for ourselves how well the leading products coped with real workloads. More than that, we wanted to find out how the vendors themselves measured up given that they are all pretty young.”

Proof-of-concept trials were conducted towards the end of 2014, with Philippe Feijoo and his team stress testing two platforms with a mix of Windows and Linux VMs running typical application workloads. Each met the company’s basic technical brief in terms of convergence and manageability, but the merits of the Nutanix platform quickly became apparent as workloads were increased and a series of disaster recovery tests were added to the mix.

“Nutanix proved to be a much more scalable solution,” comments Mr. Feijoo, “plus the Nutanix team were a great deal more responsive and knowledgeable when we created support issues for them to resolve, enabling us to get the product up and fully working in just one day.”

The team at Vaudoise Assurances also wanted to replicate the high-availability clustering available with its existing NetApp storage platform and soon discovered this was only possible with Nutanix, as Mr. Feijoo further explains. “The new Metro Availability technology in Nutanix was a real tie-breaker as far as we were concerned, enabling us to have a synchronized environment with the possibility to failover VMs between data centres without any loss of data and with a very short downtime period.”

Having proved its worth in the trials, Vaudoise Assurances has now completed the first phase of the project installing Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform appliances in two data centres, thus providing the company with eight compute nodes and 14TB of distributed storage. Over 100 VMs have since been migrated to the new hyper-converged infrastructure and the next phase will see more appliances added, instantly doubling available compute and storage resources to cope with anticipated future workloads.
“Nutanix has made switching to a hyper-converged infrastructure a piece of cake,” says Feijoo, “and it’s a solution I’d highly recommend if only for the peace of mind of knowing that our environment is fully scalable, compute and storage-wise, with no hassle. Plus, with Metro Availability, we know it's all going to be there when its needed, no matter what happens.”