COMPANY
Black Tiger Belgium is part of the Black Tiger Group, a French software company that has developed a new generation Customer Data Platform, ‘Master CDP’ specialized in business data activation, natively supporting data quality and compliance issues.
INDUSTRY
Data management
BUSINESS NEED
- Old infrastructure needed a full replacement combined with a relocation of the data center
- Migration was under time pressure from a company carve-out
- New environment had to guarantee the highest possible uptime and offer scalability to meet the expectations of the SLA’s of customers
- Efficient management and state-of-the-art technology for a relatively small IT team
SOLUTION
- Nutanix AHV Acropolis
- Nutanix Prism Pro
- Nutanix Karbon
BENEFITS
- 0% downtime allows for High Availability offerings to customers
- Increased efficiency to manage the infrastructure with one third less people
- Optimized storage budget thanks to transparent and automatic storage management
- Predictability and central monitoring
CHALLENGE
Black Tiger Belgium is part of the Black Tiger Group, a French software company that has developed a new generation Customer Data Platform, 'Master CDP' specialized in business data activation, natively supporting data quality and compliance. It has a strong reputation as a specialist in the management and use of personal data that is often business-critical to their clients. They strive to provide a High Availability offering that guarantees the highest possible uptime and is fully compliant, built on values of ethics, transparency, and innovation. Since their infrastructure was at the end of its life cycle, it was time for a full and future-proof replacement. However, the project was under a lot of time pressure due to the separation of the company from the mother group. This meant that all shared assets had to be retrieved in a local environment.
The company identified two possible scenarios: either continue to work with traditional storage boxes or move to a modern hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). “We decided to go for the innovative solution and avoid single points of failure by implementing HCI. But since there was no room for trial and error, we needed proven technology and a reliable partner”, says Christophe De Brabanter, Solution Architect/R&D Director at Black Tiger Belgium. Fortunately, they already had a longstanding ICT partner who understands their business needs. Core ICT is a growing Belgian IT company that provides solutions for complex infrastructures and acts as an independent advisor for clients.
With no time for a proof-of-concept, the criteria for the solution were evident. It had to be reliable and avoid single points of failure. Black Tiger Belgium wanted scalability and a cloud-first approach that can be deployed on premise and that would free them from the data sensitivity issues of the public cloud. The company was also looking for management efficiencies to support its relatively small team of system administrators. Furthermore, there was a clear roadmap towards container technology and Kubernetes orchestration, and SDDC mode.
SOLUTION
Core ICT and Black Tiger Belgium agreed that Nutanix would be the best choice to implement HCI. “We have a multi-vendor strategy at Core ICT, but Nutanix is our most trusted partner when it comes to HCI environments”, says Kristof Van Elshocht, Technical Sales Engineer at Core ICT. “Nutanix offers much more than hardware and storage. Being software-defined and automated, it is the new way of working.” Black Tiger Belgium installed a hybrid cluster with their main activity running on the Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor. In addition, they also have software that requires VMware ESX running. Thanks to Nutanix Prism Pro, the company’s system administrators can easily manage both sub-clusters from one central console.
For Black Tiger Belgium, Karbon Kubernetes Orchestration is another important feature of Nutanix. “We come from a world where we used to work with classic VMs, but now we often need to support the live context of retailers, telcos, couriers, etc. Fixed VMs do not provide the most optimal solution for this, so we started working with Kubernetes clusters. Whereas a VM takes a lot of time to spin up, a docker container can do this in a split second, says Christophe De Brabanter. Karbon is a module in Nutanix that enables users to launch a new Kubernetes cluster in just a few clicks. Upgrades are also completely automated and require no manual work. “The possibility to dynamically scale up and down really appealed to our system admins”, says De Brabanter.
RESULTS
The implementation of the new infrastructure started in February 2021 and was completed in about two months. Core ICT guided and trained the internal team of Black Tiger Belgium to take control of the migration. The process of replacing old infrastructure by a new environment can be challenging, but Core ICT’s experience and the flexibility of Nutanix ensured that everything could keep running during the migration without losing a single second of production.
Thanks to the new environment, Black Tiger Belgium offers its customers the highest possible availability. “Up to now, we have had 0% downtime. We provide our clients the stability they need for their business-critical data. We are able to respond to the increasing pressure of their SLA’s and do even more than before the migration”, says Marc Uytdenbroek, Head of R&D and IT at Black Tiger Belgium. “The scalability and robustness of the infrastructure also match our ambition to grow on an international level. It gives us peace of mind that we can expand our business in the future.”
“With an on-premises solution like Nutanix we have all the benefits of the cloud without the related risks. We can manage everything in our own ISO certified data center. This is important for our customers who want to know where their data is stored”, says Uytdenbroek. “Our Nutanix environment allows us to make the Black Tiger platform the authority for ethical data and become the GDPR party of choice for businesses, providing high-level security, out-of-the-box encryption and compliance at all times.”
In addition, efficient management of the environments allows Black Tiger Belgium’s IT team to focus on their core business instead of performing time-consuming manual tasks. Besides centralized monitoring, Nutanix also adds predictability features and transparency. “The automatic management of hot and cold storage helps us to optimize our storage budget, which is very important for a data-intensive company like Black Tiger”, says Christophe De Brabanter. As a result, the infrastructure team of Black Tiger Belgium can now keep everything up and running with a third less manpower.
NEXT STEPS
In the short term, Black Tiger Belgium aims to complete the Karbon implementation and bring all their services to the same high availability level. Next, they want to explore other features that Nutanix has to offer and see how they can continue to improve their customer services. For this, Black Tiger Belgium can count on the ongoing guidance provided by Core ICT or reach out to Nutanix Support. “Core ICT’s advice and coaching has prevented most situations where we need support, but it gives great comfort that Nutanix is there to provide us with international assistance around the clock”, says Christophe De Brabanter. “We see our successful partnerships with Nutanix and Core ICT as long-term collaborations that support the growth of our business and that of our customers.
PARTNER
