B-Online is a leading integrated telecommunications and information services provider in the Middle East offering customized and managed solutions. B-Online operates in Kuwait and have built their own cloud platform that runs on Nutanix since 2021 – They provide any IT-related solution as a service, also known as “anything as a service” or XaaS. Businesses are implementing XaaS solutions for greater digital transformation and agility, lower costs, and increased efficiency.
The Nutanix HCI platform provides a great deal of flexibility to accommodate diverse workloads, it quickly adapts to business needs and changes of requirement or accommodate fluctuating workloads. It helps B-online thrive through our vision of network virtualization and softwareization by Software-define networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) solutions that can be easily adopted using HCI. Lastly, it helps our organization address the arising demands from pervasive cloud computing and changes in the way ICT groups approach networking,
The B-online environment was a 3 tier infrastructure built on traditional physical servers and storage or virtual or the combination of both. Infrastructure monitoring and management was a key challenge and aging infrastructure was hindering B-Online’s sustainability ambitions. “Because of these shortcomings, we needed to achieve greater operational resilience and security and we needed an expert like Nutanix to modernize and optimize our infrastructure,” said Irfan.
Key evaluation criteria included the solution’s ability to reduce or eliminate downtime and save the IT team time and effort by simplifying management and administration.
Nutanix solutions have helped B-online shrink their hardware footprint, thereby reducing power costs. IT teams are now spending less time deploying and managing the B-online server environment and IT infrastructure. This has freed up the IT teams to work on more valuable e-add tasks, helped them feel more relaxed and made everything more predictable giving them more control than they had in the past.
Updating the firmware has historically been a cumbersome task with lots of dependencies and a potential for downtime. Storage upgrades are now typically done with just a few mouse clicks, giving the team a lot more flexibility, and taking the pressure off capacity planning. “We have reduced the time spent on platform management by 40% to 55%. In addition to that, Nutanix University helped our technical teams and business users gain the knowledge needed to maximize the benefits of the easy-to-use solution, “commented Irfan.
Our customers expect more functionality combined with high stability and rapid convergence at a good price. We see ourselves in good hands with Nutanix and well prepared for the future. Nutanix not only offered us the ideal platform with its products but also leaves all possibilities open in the future. This gives us the agility we need to serve the ever-growing needs of our customers as an ISP easily, quickly, and cost-effectively.
“In our digitally driven society, outages of high-profile online services can quickly become breaking news headlines. We decided to invest in cost-efficient solutions that are agile and reliable, yet scalable and flexible enough to accommodate change. We also wanted to leverage the best possible technology— on premise or in the cloud—to deliver the highest levels of performance and security. We were evaluating multiple options for migration. We were running on Nutanix so decided to offer the same solution to our customers. So, we chose Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) as a go-to solution- a software-defined architecture that extends virtualization across compute, storage, and networking. We found out that Nutanix HCI is extremely simple to install and manage compared with traditional three-tier architecture models. “The scale out option in building public cloud services was helpful to estimate the growth and plan the new investment accordingly,” added Ayman Abu Jalalah , Director of Technology, B-online.
B-online offer their customers IaaS – Infrastructure, BaaS - Backup, DRaaS - DR, ESaaS – Email Security, WAFaaS – Web Application Firewall and STaaS – Storage, all on Nutanix Platform.
Reduced Footprint: “We were able to reduce our hardware stack to just what we need, rather than overprovision excessive capacity. Moving away from the siloed approach also allowed us to eliminate certain hardware. We realized a 75% reduction in hardware resource with the capability to scale IT environment quickly and efficiently. We are on track to achieve our long-held goal to virtualize 100% of the network functions before 2023. We are nearly there; we will hit that mark in one year from now. This not only helped us in reducing hardware footprint but also helped us in saving rack space, power requirements, cooling and simplified on cable management too,” said Irfan. “If we would had continued to use traditional infrastructure, we would have paid 60% more than we do with Nutanix to run similar work loads,” he added.
The Technology is simple to adopt doesn’t require past experience of team or skill set and has been designed in a way that is very easy to understand. Technology deployment is quite simple and straight forward where the IT admin staff can manage the entire network from a single console.
Enablement & Training: The Nutanix Partner Portal makes enablement and training extremely effective, convenient and consistent. B-Online were able to quickly and easily migrate their customers’ servers from on premise infrastructure directly into Nutanix VMs. You can choose to easily migrate from a single server up to thousands of servers. “We were able to migrate an entire data center load for a customer in under 36 hours. The process of migration from traditional hardware to an HCI cloud ready platform was very helpful, not only to align internal infrastructure but it has also given us a chance to plan a new vertical to offer cloud services to our esteemed customers,” said Ayman Abu Jalalah , Director of Technology, B-online.
Technical support: Nutanix has a focused, proactive, 24-hour support for production and mission-critical environment. When a customer opens a support ticket, Information can flow quickly between the customer support team and other teams until raised tickets are resolved effectively and on time. This makes Nutanix customer care extra efficient and thorough. “Application requirements can change in a heartbeat. Find a vendor who is seen as an understanding business partner and supporter with a flexible, customizable support structure that can be adapted to your needs, “ said Irfan. “For the past twelve years I have been working with Nutanix, Nutanix performs twice as well as the average business in the IT industry,” added Irfan.
“Consistently acquiring new customers is crucial for our business. We have partnered with Nutanix to build a scale-out, multi -purpose infrastructure platform with advanced security tools to broaden the pool of customers we can serve. The internet has revolutionized global sectors such as business, communications, education, retail, healthcare, financial services, and government. In addition to the expected increase in connected devices, the content we consume and create will continue to evolve as the world is becoming increasingly online. Content streaming will become more and more prevalent in business and entertainment as more online services are integrated into daily life. As an ISP, we need to ensure the availability of critical business workloads with quick failover to the cloud, to make sure businesses and individuals receive round-the-clock high-speed connectivity for years to come. With Nutanix, we’re futureproofing our network for our customers homes and business. The multi-tenant architecture offers us significant benefits including lower cost, scalability, high customization without expensive, time-consuming, and sometimes risky custom development,’’ concluded Irfan.