Nutanix, a hybrid multicloud computing provider, announced that BUPA will use Nutanix solutions to address performance, scalability, and management issues in its mission-critical Citrix environment, which supports over 5,000 users.
These issues were resolved quickly by migrating from a legacy infrastructure to the Nutanix Cloud platform and Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV). BUPA has also begun using Nutanix Calm to fully automate management of its DaaS computing system and enable rapid deployment of this and other workloads to any cloud in accordance with its long-term multicloud strategy.
BUPA, a health insurance and healthcare provider, saw DaaS computing as a business-critical application and had invested heavily in a cutting-edge Citrix solution tailored to its exacting requirements. However, the legacy infrastructure that supported that software was nearing the end of its life cycle, and its replacement would need to address a number of long-standing issues.
Scalability, in particular, had become a major headache, necessitating consensus among multiple stakeholders even for minor upgrades and changes. Even so, those changes could take days or weeks, severely limiting BUPA’s ability to respond quickly to changing business demands. Furthermore, it was a very complex setup requiring expert skills across multiple disciplines just to keep the infrastructure lights on, let alone improve or develop it further.
Despite its small size, the BUPA technology team is highly experienced, and it didn’t take long to realize that switching to Nutanix Cloud Platform would be the best way forward for its Citrix DaaS solution. The chosen configuration called for Nutanix clusters at each of the two sites to support the existing 3,000 DaaS computing users while also allowing for future growth. These were quickly delivered and then deployed across two sites to meet the requirements for rapid failover and disaster recovery.
Users noticed an immediate improvement in desktop performance, while Nutanix and Citrix worked behind the scenes to optimize the environment. Furthermore, with on-demand scaling and full end-to-end visibility from a single console, the entire system became much simpler and easier to manage. Support has also been simplified, with a single point of contact for all issues, hardware or software-related, including the hypervisor. All of this can now be managed from a single console, removing the need for expert knowledge and freeing up staff to focus on other tasks, such as plans to use Nutanix Calm to automate all aspects of the application lifecycle.
“By migrating our DaaS computing environment from a legacy 3-tier platform to Nutanix we’ve gained a lot more than just a more scalable, performant and agile infrastructure. We’ve kept operational costs down by using the AHV hypervisor and further lowered support overheads with Nutanix Calm which is enabling us to both automate day to day management tasks and move forward with confidence to a multicloud future,” said Rick Jagger, Technical Services Manager, BUPA.
BUPA, like most large enterprises, anticipates that the Cloud will play an increasing role in its IT strategy. It is already considering using Calm to enable it to redeploy rather than upgrade existing applications. Calm’s ability to rapidly deploy DaaS computing and other applications onto any cloud and, where possible, balance workloads across what could eventually become a global multicloud network supporting other parts of the BUPA business also impresses BUPA.
