Nutanix announced today that the Jordanian government entity Ministry of Digital Economy and Entrepreneurship (MoDEE) has successfully deployed Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) and Nutanix Prism Pro management solution. The implementation enables secure, high-performance email services for the entire Jordanian government and provides high-availability for over 53,000 mailboxes with the ability to effortlessly expand capacity as required. The solution has also reduced infrastructure costs, and IT management overheads.
The Ministry’s email environment comprised of Exchange 2010 built on 4 physical servers configured in mailbox roles connected to Dell SAN Storage, 8 VMs configured as client access servers (CAS), and a HUB server built on a Hyper-V cluster. With tens of thousands of email accounts running on this infrastructure a number of hardware resources, as well as monitoring and management limitations arose.
Having most of its cloud services, as well as its entire Disaster Recovery (DR) environment based on Nutanix, MoDEE was confident that migrating Microsoft Exchange to Nutanix would address these pressing challenges. As a government entity however, the Ministry did its due diligence in thoroughly vetting solutions from other global leading vendors. Key evaluation criteria included the solution’s ability to reduce or eliminate downtime, ensure compatibility with existing systems, and save the IT team time and effort by simplifying management and administration.
“Nutanix stood out for its ability to offer the most compute resources and storage at a more attractive price point and in a small form factor. They convincingly demonstrated how data migration and expansion could be effortlessly accommodated and offered us the freedom to use any of the most popular hypervisors,” explained Abdallah Farrayih, Head of Operation, MoDEE
After a seamless implementation, MoDEE’s IT team successfully migrated user mailboxes to the new environment, a process Farrayih described as ‘very reliable and easy to deploy’. “On average, we were able to migrate 1,000 mailboxes in under 3 hours,” he said.
At present, the number of mailboxes running in the Nutanix environment stands at a staggering 53,000. Despite this incredible, and ever-growing number, the IT team finds the new environment to be significantly faster and more stable than their previous setup. “With Nutanix, because we have everything working in one box, the data transfer performance is truly impressive. The connection to the Exchange Management Console and Exchange Management shell are also faster than before,” said Farrayih.
Erasure coding and compression ensure security and segmentation between mailboxes is maintained, while Nutanix Prism allows the IT team to easily monitor and manage the entire environment from a single, centralized dashboard. “Nutanix is a very powerful solution and can help you build a reliable, scalable and high-performance environment. Management and hosting of critical government services in this environment has become incredibly easy, and we now have the ability to create any environment in just a few clicks. This has resulted in an increase in employee productivity, as well as a greater ability for IT to innovate,” said Farrayih.
