Riverside's Server and Storage Consolidation with Nutanix in New York
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Nutanix Complete Cluster
- VMware
Tech Stack
- Converged Infrastructure
- VMware Hypervisor
- SATA and SSD Storage
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Energy Saving
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Applicable Industries
- Finance & Insurance
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
The Riverside Company is a prominent global private equity firm that specializes in investing in companies with enterprise values of under $200 million. With a focus on nurturing and building companies into more effective enterprises, Riverside employs time-tested management techniques, organic growth strategies, and add-on acquisitions. The firm manages over $3 billion in assets and has a workforce of 200 employees spread across 20 countries worldwide. Riverside has a rich history of completing more than 270 acquisitions, making it the largest and oldest private equity firm in its category. The company's investment strategy is centered around creating value and driving growth in its portfolio companies.
The Challenge
Riverside Company faced the challenge of consolidating its aging server and storage infrastructure from five different sites across the U.S. into a single data center located in New York. The existing infrastructure supported critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server databases, file and print servers, and web servers. However, the distributed and siloed environment was difficult to manage and lacked high availability features. The IT department had been reorganized and centralized, prompting the IT director to seek a centralized infrastructure solution. Initially, they considered deploying a VMware virtual environment supported by a traditional enterprise SAN from vendors like EMC or NetApp. However, the cost associated with a SAN, including its footprint, ongoing maintenance, and power consumption, presented a significant budgetary challenge.
The Solution
Riverside Company opted for the Nutanix Complete Cluster as an alternative to traditional SAN solutions. The Nutanix Complete Cluster is a converged compute and storage platform specifically designed for virtual environments, eliminating the need for a separate SAN. The platform features built-in storage that is automatically unified and shared among all nodes, making it both space- and energy-efficient. Each Nutanix Complete Block is a rackable 2U unit that includes four dual-processor compute nodes and 22.5 TB of raw SATA and SSD capacity. The system allows for expansion in a pay-as-you-grow manner by adding more Complete Blocks to the cluster. The web-based console simplifies management, enabling Riverside's small IT staff to focus more on application delivery. The platform comes preloaded with a VMware hypervisor and supports VM high availability and live migration. Riverside purchased a Nutanix Complete Cluster to host applications at its New York datacenter. The company was particularly impressed with the technical support provided by Nutanix during installation, configuration, and testing. The engineers assisted not only with the Nutanix product but also with adjacent technologies like switching equipment. Riverside plans to install a second Nutanix Complete Cluster as a replication target at a warm disaster recovery site to protect enterprise data in real-time and allow for failover in case of a system failure at the local data center.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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