Operators of photovoltaic systems around the world use SMA's web portals to access current data and analyses of their systems. The digital energy management infrastructure runs on a Nutanix HCI platform.
SMA, one of the world's leading specialists in photovoltaic system technology, offers its customers digital services via several web portals. More than one million systems in 200 countries are registered in SMA's Sunny Portal alone. To quickly process and analyze the real-time data collected there, the company needs a high-performance, highly available, and easily scalable IT infrastructure.
Reliable platform for digital services
Nutanix clusters process billions of records from tens of millions of edge devices every month. On this basis, SMA is developing new digital services for its customers.
More agility, less complexity
The IT team now has the flexibility to adapt and expand the infrastructure without having to deal with the complexity of a three-tier architecture.
Lower costs by migrating to AHV
SMA migrated 1,500 VMs from VMware ESXi to the AHV hypervisor, saving significant licensing costs. Nutanix Move ensured a smooth transition with minimal downtime.
The Nutanix platform has supported our growth in recent years, enabling us to quickly and reliably deliver new digital services to our customers. What we really like about working with Nutanix is that they are always willing to listen to our unique needs and respond to our requests faster than other vendors.
SMA is a leading global provider of photovoltaic and storage system technology, headquartered in Germany with 19 offices worldwide. The company has been at the forefront of renewable energy development for more than 40 years. SMA's portfolio includes highly efficient solar and battery inverters, integrated system solutions for photovoltaic systems, intelligent energy management systems, charging solutions for electric vehicles and solutions for Power2Gas applications. The SMA solar inverters installed worldwide since 2003, with a total output of around 132 gigawatts, help to avoid more than 70 million tons of CO2 emissions every year.
In order to provide private and commercial customers with optimal support in the operation of their photovoltaic systems, SMA has also continuously expanded its range of digital services in recent years. "Among other things, we have built Europe's largest photovoltaic portal, which now has more than one million systems registered," explains Thoralf Geese, DevOps Engineer at SMA Solar Technology AG. "System owners and installers can use the Sunny Portal to access all important live data from their systems, analyze measured values and visualize their yields."
The web portal is constantly fed with information from millions of data endpoints distributed around the world. In total, the infrastructure behind the portal must process up to 1.5 billion measurement records per month. This is the equivalent of about 35 terabytes of data. "It is mission-critical that we can always rely on the availability and performance of our infrastructure," emphasizes Martin Jäger, IT Architect at SMA. "If the data from the edge devices is not processed in time, our customers will see outdated data or no data at all for their system in the portal."
The existing three-tier architecture in SMA's data center, however, was already struggling a few years ago to keep up with growing demands. The IT team needed a lot of resources to manage the various infrastructure components, and individual systems were constantly reaching their performance limits. For example, when SMA was renewing its SAN infrastructure, it struggled for a long time with performance issues that the vendors involved initially could not solve. "Finding the root cause of the problem was complicated by finger-pointing between storage, software, and virtualization vendors," says Martin Jäger. "That is why we finally decided to break new ground in the development of our infrastructure."
SMA considered moving the web portal infrastructure to the public cloud in the future. However, the portal's highly individual load profile, with numerous latency-sensitive processes, could not be satisfactorily mapped to a cloud architecture. In addition, SMA's IT team did not want to become dependent on individual cloud providers. "The software solutions for our systems have a very long lifecycle, so we can't rely on hyperscaler-specific services that may suddenly be discontinued by the provider or become unaffordable due to price increases," says Martin Jäger.
For these reasons, SMA initially moved only parts of its access infrastructure to the public cloud. A global Web Connect Overlay Network allows edge devices distributed around the world to automatically connect to the nearest entry point. Communication with the portal then takes place over secure, tunneled connections.
SMA implemented a Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) for the actual operation of the portal infrastructure. This enabled the company to future-proof its fast-growing digital service offerings without sacrificing control over data and applications. The Nutanix platform integrates computing, storage, networking, and virtualization into a software-defined solution that can be managed from a single interface.
"The Nutanix Cloud Platform concept is a perfect fit for our needs, as it allows us to move away from the complexity of a traditional three-tier architecture and easily provision and scale the IT resources for our web portal," says Thoralf Geese. "The platform combines the flexibility and efficiency of a cloud solution with the performance and security of an on-premises infrastructure. This allows us to offer our customers reliable access to our digital services around the clock."
With the Nutanix platform proven in testing, the IT team deployed the first production HCI clusters and migrated the portal infrastructure to the new environment. SMA then gradually expanded the environment to support additional users and workloads. Today, approximately 1,500 virtual machines with 4.5 petabytes of storage are running on six Nutanix clusters in an off-site data center. In addition to Sunny Portal, SMA now also provides its browser-based planning software Sunny Design via the environment.
The entire infrastructure and processes required to operate the web portals have been ISO/IEC 27001 certified since the end of 2024. The globally valid certificate confirms that SMA meets the highest security standards to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of sensitive information.
Ease of scalability during operation
The Nutanix platform gives SMA the flexibility to scale the performance of the portal infrastructure as demand increases. "In the past we were often running from bottleneck to bottleneck and spending a lot of time integrating additional resources, but now we can grow with demand," says Martin Jäger. "The individual components of the Nutanix platform can be expanded in a granular way if we need more compute power or additional storage, for example. This way, we avoid costly over-provisioning of resources."
The infrastructure can be easily scaled during operation. The IT team can add more nodes to the production clusters without impacting the availability of digital services. Especially for SMA's business customers, it is absolutely crucial that the web portal is available with as little interruption as possible. Large solar farms, for example, provide information on the amount of electricity produced directly to transmission system operators. This assumes that the data can be accessed at any time.
Optimal performance for new digital services
SMA's IT team is also very satisfied with the performance of the infrastructure. "There have been plenty of changes on the application side recently," explains Martin Jäger. "In addition to relational databases, NoSQL architectures and platforms such as Hadoop and Kafka are becoming increasingly important. The Nutanix infrastructure enables us to meet the performance requirements of these technologies."
Especially for future use cases, such as the intelligent control of power consumption, SMA will need to process and analyze large amounts of data in real time. This is the only way the company can help make energy use more efficient and avoid grid overloads. With Nutanix, the IT team can also quickly provision the resources needed for these new workloads.
Cost savings and flexible expansion to the cloud
The Nutanix platform has ultimately helped SMA improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of its IT infrastructure. An important step in this process was moving from its previous virtualization solution, VMware ESXi, to Nutanix AHV. This allowed the company to save on server virtualization licensing costs, and it now runs all virtual machines on the integrated hypervisor of the Nutanix platform.
"The Nutanix Move migration tool made it much easier for us to move about 1,500 VMs," says Thoralf Geese. "With this solution, we were able to migrate both Windows and Linux machines to the new environment very easily and reliably. The entire migration process was on schedule and largely automated, with less than five minutes of downtime per VM."
According to Martin Jäger, the change in virtualization platform has paid off for other reasons as well: "We see significant performance improvements and more efficient resource utilization when running our workloads on AHV. When problems arise, we have a single point of contact for the entire technology stack. And last but not least, Nutanix offers much easier portability to the cloud than VMware."
Even if the portal infrastructure continues to run in an on-premises environment for the time being, migrating workloads to the public cloud is a distinct possibility in the future. With Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2), SMA was able to seamlessly extend its infrastructure to hyperscalers such as AWS or Azure and flexibly move applications between environments without the need for any customization.
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