Bunduq delivers high performance and reliability with Nutanix

Bunduq Company Limited is migrating from a legacy infrastructure to the Nutanix Cloud platform and Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) to power mission-critical applications and services, according to Nutanix, a provider of hybrid multicloud computing. The implementation increased application performance by more than 50%, reduced datacenter costs by nearly 40%, and created a seamless infrastructure that ensures reliability, resilience, security, and flexibility.

Bunduq Company Limited was founded in December 1970 to develop the offshore El Bunduq oil field on the border of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and the State of Qatar, about 200 kilometers west of Abu Dhabi and 100 kilometers east of Doha. The success of the El Bunduq Oil Development Project is attributed to the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and the State of Qatar’s fruitful collaboration.

Speaking about the need for overhaul of the company’s IT infrastructure, Muayad Fahmawi, IT Supervisor at Bunduq comments, “Digital transformation is an imperative approach today. Our earlier environment was purely traditional physical infrastructure with hardware. We were plagued with issues like operational complexities, system downtime, huge delays in backup and recovery processes. The earlier environment featured a centralized SAN storage which was only a ‘scale up’ technology which limited our expansion plans. After a thorough study, we decided to opt for ‘scale out’ hyperconverged infrastructure from Nutanix, which providing best infrastructure and removes all limitations, so we can keep growing and gradually phase out the old hardware.”

Along with the Nutanix solution, the IT team at Bunduq deployed Veeam software for modern data protection and the SAP HANA multimodel database as part of the transition from a physical to a virtualized environment. Veeam and SAP HANA both have certified Nutanix integrations.

The first benefit seen following Nutanix implementation was improved application performance. The various oil-related simulation applications and software that were sluggish in the previous environment saw a 50% performance increase with Nutanix due to the use of the most recent processor and all data reading happening through SSD drives.

Another significant advantage was flexibility. Large amounts of data and processing power are required for simulation applications. The IT team can easily increase the RAM for clients/workstations using Nutanix. Alternatively, in the case of VDI, CPU performance can be rapidly increased.

Backups were previously a difficult proposition for the company due to strict data compliance regulations, taking over a day to complete and sometimes failing completely. Backup of virtual machines now takes less than an hour thanks to Veeam’s direct integration with Nutanix via AHV.

In addition to backup issues, the company encountered issues with database testing. With older physical servers, it was sometimes necessary to copy the entire database, which was around 122GB in size, for testing, which would take more than a day and a half. After the SAP HANA implementation on the Nutanix platform, copying a 170Gb database now takes no more than 5 hours.

One of the big upsides of the implementation has been the reduced complexity relating to system maintenance, thanks toNutanix Prism. With the earlier siloed infrastructure, management of disparate systems was very challenging. Monitoring agents had to be installed for the physical servers and the IT team had to manually check whether the previous days’ backups were completed or not. “Now it’s very easy. We log into the Prism control where we can see the live status of all the virtual machines’ performance – CPU, memory, hard disk usage, even the backup. Everything is integrated in one console. We are able to see everything!” says Muayad Fahmawi.

“In terms of upgrading and updating the server and drivers, earlier a big plan was needed – you had to individually upgrade the server drivers for example and the hypervisor. And of course, there was system downtime during the upgrades. But with Prism, it’s a one-click upgrade with no downtime,” he continues.

The previous infrastructure consisted of three racks in the datacenter. Nutanix assisted with datacenter consolidation, resulting in a 40% estimated cost savings due to datacenter space being cut in half.

Speaking about the success of the project and how it will evolve in future, Muayad Fahmawi says, “Earlier we used to receive regular complaints from end‐users, and vendors like SAP, about our system performance, access to servers and other such issues, but after Nutanix, we are thrilled to say that this is a thing of the past.”

“We have one more project in the pipeline – building the SAP cluster as a disaster recovery service in Microsoft Azure. We intend replicating directly from Nutanix to Azure Cloud. Nutanix has removed all limitations and we can continue to innovate and successfully navigate our digital transformation roadmap!”