BCS chooses Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Solution with native high availability using Nutanix Xi Leap Disaster Recovery as a Service
Nutanix (NASDAQ: NTNX), a leader in enterprise cloud computing, has announced that BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, is migrating its legacy IT infrastructure to the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud and integrated AHV hypervisor. Part of a planned relocation of its Swindon HQ, the UK charity is also using Xi Leap to provide secure backup and disaster recovery via the Nutanix cloud, eliminating the need to equip and manage a second DR installation.
BCS, the professional body for the IT industry, selected Nutanix as their preferred solution from several hybrid Cloud vendors in the market. This will enable the organisation to move forward with its digital transformation plans and, at the same time, replace end of life servers and storage networks with a single Nutanix cluster, saving valuable rack space while also reducing power and cooling costs.
During the migration, BCS plans to move 60+ virtual machines from VMware to the Nutanix AHV hypervisor plus complete the virtualisation of its remaining physical servers. This will deliver both scalability and savings in terms of hypervisor licensing, physical infrastructure and operational costs – but BCS’ decision wasn’t driven by financial benefits alone.
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“Beyond performance, scalability and feature set, we were looking chiefly for simplicity,” explains Dugal Williams, Network Engineer at BCS. “The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud plus AHV more than meets that requirement, helping enable us to manage our virtual and physical resources together from the one Prism console.”
This quest for simplicity also led to BCS choosing Xi Leap, a cloud-hosted Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution built natively into the Nutanix software. Managed through the same Prism interface, Xi Leap eliminates the need to equip and manage a separate recovery site and costs considerably less than a comparable on-premise DR solution.
“We originally planned to look into DR options once the move to the new offices and infrastructure migration were over,” commented Williams. “However, when we found we could do it so quickly and simply with Xi Leap, and without having to buy or run additional hardware. It quickly became a no-brainer and something we could also use to help with the migration itself.”
Instant onboarding to the service was another deciding factor. As were end-to-end encryption, integrated orchestration for one-click failover and failback, and service level agreements to meet a 1-hour Recovery Point Objective (RPO*) and as little as a 3-minute Recovery Time Objective (RTO**). Xi Leap customers also benefit from support for partial failover for server maintenance and application testing, non-disruptive testing tools to help ensure business continuity and the ability to manage source and target sites as a single environment.
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“Nutanix HCI software plus Xi Leap is an optimal combination for organisations like BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT,” commented Dom Poloniecki, General Manager, Sales, Western Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa region. “BCS’ deployment is a perfect example to organisations who want to guarantee the availability of their on-premise environments without having to invest in, or manage, a separate DR stack. A scalable, secure and technically advanced solution, Xi Leap is especially suited to those with limited resources, looking for a turnkey solution able to deliver not just a highly scalable hybrid cloud, but maximum uptime for minimal effort.”
* Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – the ability to successfully recover from a snapshot taken within the time frame selected by the customer as a virtual machine in powered on state, during unplanned failover scenarios.
**Recovery Time Objective (RTO) – the ability to activate a Recovery Plan within the time frame specified in the Nutanix Service commitments, during a planned or unplanned failover scenario. Recovery plan activation time is measured from the time of receipt of an activation command (via UI or API) to the time when the VMs in the Recovery Plan have their virtual machines in a powered-on state on the Service.
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About BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT
BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, is the professional body for the IT industry. Our mission is to make IT good for society. We promote wider social and economic progress through the advancement of computer science and computing practice. We bring together industry, academics, practitioners and government to share knowledge, promote new thinking, inform the design of new education curricula, shape public policy and inform the public.
