Nutanix announced today that the Royal Court in the Kingdom of Bahrain has implemented Nutanix Clusters that provide a highly available hybrid cloud Infrastructure for virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and critical end-user applications. The solution has increased uptime, simplified operations with an integrated management platform, increased security of the infrastructure and substantially lowered operating expenses (OPEX).
Speaking about the implementation, Mr. Indra Zulardi, Infrastructure Network, System and Virtualization specialist, Royal Court in the Kingdom of Bahrain said, “My team strives for excellence. We have set extremely high standards for ourselves and have entered into a 99.9% service level agreement (SLA) with the Royal Court. But we couldn’t guarantee that degree of stability using traditional IT infrastructure. Virtualization through streamlining our data centres and reducing the number of physical servers brought us partway to our ultimate goal, but it wasn’t enough. The best way to achieve our targets was to shift to hyperconverged infrastructure.”
“We tested this Nutanix and VMWare combination on HP and Dell thin clients. End users immediately noticed the faster speeds and appreciated the convenience of logging into a full-powered system from any device connected to our network. They enjoyed the same performance on a top-of-the-line desktop as they did on a thin client or a budget laptop. They could take their work with them anywhere, and they could do so without carrying their files on USB sticks because all their data was stored on the VDIs at our data center,” said Mr. Indra Zulardi.
Nutanix also made it easier to scale the IT infrastructure as needed because it allowed the roll-out of new virtual machines and capacity to existing VDIs as needed. Switching to Nutanix eliminated the OPEX expense, thus substantially lowering annual costs.
The IT infrastructure is more secure because all the VDIs— the applications and data they contain reside in the data center. Mr. Indra Zulardi and his team can manage updates and upgrades from a central location and spin up more capacity whenever users need it. Files no longer go missing because they are centrally stored, automatically backed up, and retrievable from any computer with access to the network. The application base has also been standardized.
Royal Court users are restricted to Microsoft 365, Microsoft Exchange, SAP, and a handful of apps required by some specialists. Troubleshooting now is easier than ever. The IT team can monitor, manage, and configure the entire data centre or specific VDIs from a single pane of glass. Using intuitive dashboards, they can also add RAM, CPUs, and storage at a push of a button. If a virtual machine crashes, it can be restored in a matter of minutes.
The next step, as per Mr. Indra Zulardi, is to refresh the Nutanix cluster. The existing setup is at 75% capacity, and more infrastructure is needed to move all of the Royal Court’s staff to VDIs. Nutanix Files, a software-defined scale-out file storage solution, is also going to be added to the mix of products next year to improve data sharing with NFS and iSCSI functionality and to scale archival storage.
