Continent 8 Technologies Bets On Nutanix To Build Out Their Regulated Public Cloud  

CHALLENGES

As a global MSP with over 20 years’ experience and operating in over 80 locations worldwide, Continent 8 Technologies is no stranger to the challenges faced by customers working in the highly regulated iGaming sector. Particularly those wanting to take advantage of public cloud platforms encountering difficulties due to strict locality, security, and oversight requirements of regulatory authorities. Difficulties which can only be addressed properly by the host provider, as Justin Cosnett, Chief Product Officer at Continent 8 Technologies, explains:

“Getting approval to use a multi-tenanted product like our public cloud platform for iGaming can be a lengthy and rigorous process, requiring us to work with local gaming authorities to get the necessary licences before we can offer it to customers. There are also big differences across jurisdictions calling for a highly flexible infrastructure that can be rapidly rolled out and moulded to meet specific needs around the world.”

With its existing infrastructure requiring a refresh, Continent 8 focused on finding a better alternative rather than a simple like-for-like upgrade. An alternative which would be both more flexible and scalable as well as easy to manage to cope with a wide range of different iGaming workloads across a varied and rapidly growing customer base.

“In many jurisdictions we would be first-to-market with a public cloud iGaming platform,” commented Cosnett, “and with little data on what workloads would look like the only sure way forward would be a supporting infrastructure that would allow us to start small then scale and rapidly tailor each setup to meet the needs of the jurisdiction concerned.”

SOLUTION

After much research a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) was established as the best way of meeting this potentially daunting challenge, with several leading HCI vendors and products considered and extensively trialled before finally opting for the Nutanix Cloud Platform.

“Nutanix ticked all our boxes in terms of scalability, resilience and performance,” said Keith Stafford, Head of Cloud Architecture at Continent 8 Technologies, “and really nailed it with its mature and very capable Prism Central management interface. Moreover, although we wouldn’t be using it for the Continent 8 platform, the AHV hypervisor further prompted the decision to go with Nutanix and is something we will be using going forward. As are the many cloud services that can be added to extend the capabilities of the Nutanix platform.”

The first deployments were in four datacentres located in the Isle of Man, Ireland, Malta and Montreal in Canada. Each was equipped with a suitably sized Nutanix cluster with hybrid flash storage nodes and a VMware hypervisor to deliver virtual machines on-demand for customers to host and manage their iGaming workloads. Since then, five more, similarly configured, deployments have followed, in Taiwan, Gibraltar, Colombia and Toronto, plus the first public cloud platform to be approved by gaming regulators, DGE, in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

In total, Continent 8 now has over 70 Nutanix nodes up and working to deliver its public cloud infrastructure. All of these are managed using Prism Central and all use the redundancy and replication tools built into the Nutanix software to provide the resilience needed to meet regulatory requirements, with Veeam software added to provide further backup and recovery capabilities.

CUSTOMER OUTCOMES

It didn’t take long to get the first datacentres working, and not much longer for them to be approved by the relevant regulatory bodies. At which point it became clear that Continent 8 had made the right decision in choosing Nutanix as the preferred platform for its public cloud iGaming solution.

It does what it says on the tin

“Simply put, the Nutanix infrastructure has delivered everything we expected and more,” Stafford said. “From delivering an immediate performance lift to rock solid availability. The solution was designed with appreciation that hardware fails, however with the level of resiliency and redundancy built in, such incidents have been handled without service interruption.”

Stafford is equally impressed by the Prism management interface which, he says, has reduced operational overheads considerably. However, it’s the simple on-demand scalability of the Nutanix platform that has provided the biggest benefits. 

“We wanted to be able to start small and grow our infrastructure rapidly to meet demand as it happened, and that’s what we got. We needed to be able to scale down as well as up as market and customer needs changed, and that’s what we’ve been able to do. We were looking to build a regulatory compliant infrastructure to empower customers worldwide to move iGaming workloads to the public cloud and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

NEXT STEPS

The Continent 8 iGaming public cloud continues to grow with additional nodes being added across the network and new locations rolled out as customer and workload numbers rise. Beyond servicing that growth, however, Stafford and the team are looking also at the use of Nutanix and its AHV hypervisor to enable customers to host their own private clouds in Continent 8 datacentres.

Other plans include adding Database as a Service (DaaS) to a growing list of Continent 8 products along with support for containers and other cloud-native technologies using Nutanix software tools and services. Finally, as the premier multi-cloud solution partner to the iGaming sector, the MSP is currently growing its offerings to provide services beyond its 80+ global datacentres, and here too it sees Nutanix playing a significant role in making that goal a reality.