Al Dahra Improves App Performance 10x and Cuts Costs 60% by Consolidating Technologies with Nutanix on AWS
Operational efficiency has been significantly enhanced for globally dispersed teams of the UAE government's agribusiness leader with Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on AWS.
Overview
Al Dahra is a prominent multinational leader in agribusiness, operating over 400 thousand acres of agricultural land in Egypt, Romania, Serbia, USA, and others, specialized in the cultivation, production and trading of up to 3 million tons of essential food commodities and up to 3 million tons of animal feed.
Serving a large customer base from Commercial and Governmental sectors, Al Dahra follows its purpose Sustainably Feeding a Growing World. The group has a widespread geographic footprint, operating in over 20 countries and catering to more than 40 markets with a leading position in Asia and the Middle East.
A four-week deadline to migrate out of its UAE-based data center presented an inflection point for Al Dahra’s IT team to consolidate multiple environments into a single cloud-hosted platform. The move not only met the mandate, but brought significant performance and cost benefits that today enable Al Dhara to operate more effectively.
Key Results
Improved App Performance
10x Boost in performance of business-critical apps such as ERP
Reduced OpEx
60% Reduction in monthly cloud costs
Increased Productivity
25% Increase in infrastructure admin productivity
Users across the globe, who were entirely unaware of any migration, were reporting performance boosts of up to 10x.
Challenge
Al Dahra’s IT infrastructure – built over time through expansions and acquisitions – was complex and challenging. Three distinct IT environments – Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), VMware, and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) running in its UAE-based data center – meant multiple sets of monitoring and backup tools, taking a daily toll on IT resources.
More concerning however were the performance shortcomings of mission-critical applications such as ERP. “No matter which environment this was running on, or where our end-users were based, the performance simply wasn’t up to mark,” said Gagandeep Singh Hoda, IT Manager at Al Dahra. “Analysis revealed that despite compute looking good, the number of IOPs in each environment was woefully short.” Upgrading its storage devices, while a potential solution, would have been prohibitively expensive.
Presented with a pressing deadline to vacate their on-prem data center, Hoda and his team had urgent impetus to act. “In just four weeks, we had to complete evaluation, procurement, deployment, and migration – a herculean feat by any measure,” he said.
Solution
Where others would have seen obstacles, Hoda - an optimist and overachiever - saw opportunity. “Of our three environments, NCI consistently performed best. At the same time, we enjoyed a strong partnership with AWS and were keen to maximize the cost benefits we were eligible for,” he explained. With Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) being available on the AWS Marketplace, the choice was therefore clear.
“Via the AWS Marketplace, the procurement process couldn’t have been simpler. We were able to utilize our existing AWS credits and with Nutanix Move, which was offered at no added cost, migrating all our applications was practically effortless,” said Hoda.
Customer Outcome
While the effectiveness with which the IT team met the migration deadline impressed the company’s C-suite, it was the feedback from users that amazed them. “Almost immediately after, our CEO and CFO commended us. Users across the globe, who were entirely unaware of any migration, were reporting performance boosts of up to 10x,” said Hoda.
Offering just one such example he said, “Reports which previously took our business intelligence team four hours to compile are now generated in just four minutes. They’re able to make data-driven decisions 98% faster and far more accurately, and tailor strategies more effectively.”
Digging deeper to understand the factors driving this performance, Hoda and his team were pleasantly surprised. “We expected 2,500 to 3,000 IOPs but instead, we’re getting 7,000. This not only exceeds our expectations, but will serve our needs for the foreseeable future,” he said.
Backups, which once required multiple siloed tools, are now hassle-free thanks to Cluster Protect, a native option for backing up to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). “With one monitoring solution and one backup solution, on average, our infrastructure admins are saved two hours per day for a 25% improvement in their productivity,” said Hoda.
“We don’t have to worry about lock-in either. NC2 is available on all major public clouds and as we’ve already seen, migration is both rapid and straightforward,” said Hoda.
And in a rare case of getting ‘more for less’, these incredible benefits have come at a significantly lower total cost of ownership. “Knowing that our instances will be bare metal for at least the next three years, we can confidently switch from a Compute Savings Plan to an Instance Savings Plan. Detailed cost analysis shows this change alone will cut our monthly cloud costs by 60%,” explained Hoda.
Next Steps
Having earned the full confidence of the company’s C-suite, the IT team has set their sights on increasing application resilience. “We’re targeting more aggressive recovery-point and recovery-time objectives,” said Hoda. To do this, they plan to soon deploy two additional NC2 nodes which will enable them to run critical applications in active-active mode.
Reflecting on the successful deployment and the manner in which it has empowered Al Dahra employees, from the Americas to Australia, to operate more effectively, Hoda said, “Our incredible four-week migration and resultant performance and cost benefits proves Nutanix walks the talk. They’re a committed partner that gives us the confidence to dream big.”