What HCI can do for Asia Pacific organizations with the growing complexity of hybrid multi-cloud management in an era of edge computing, sustainability, and IT talent crunch.
Transformational shifts in the modern business world are redefining how enterprises operate and opening up opportunities to drive business outcomes and customer experience – both globally and in Asia Pacific.
In today’s digital economy, apps and data are creating new infrastructure needs and security issues. One result of such transformational shifts is edge computing. And AI and machine learning are almost ubiquitous along this digital transformation journey.
Despite developments at the edge, we should not expect data centers to go away; rather, data centers are transforming to meet the fast-evolving needs and demands of the digital economy. Sustainability has moved from being a trend to a mission-critical issue for governments and enterprises across the Asia Pacific.
However, a major hitch comes from the human front. In 2022, there is an estimated 145,000 open IT jobs unfilled globally. The situation is just as bad, if not worse, in APAC.
Here’s where AI and automation come in.
According to Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami in his keynote at the Nutanix .NEXT 2023 conference held in Chicago in May 2023, 94% of IT teams say they would benefit from having a single, unified place to manage apps and data.
“They also want to have seamless disaster recovery, scalable capacity, and unified visibility across multi-cloud and on-prem infrastructure,” said Rajiv. Fundamentally, it all boils down to breaking down siloes and simplifying management of an increasingly complex hybrid infrastructure.
More on this at the end of this article…
Cost & sustainability of data centers in Asia Pacific
Organizations in APAC are actively looking into sustainability, especially carbon emission reduction. Carbon footprint issues have become a key part of discussions recently due to government requirements and policies.
According to Nutanix, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) can be leveraged to reduce carbon footprint. One good example is Olam International, as they embraced their journey to the cloud.
Olam is reimagining global agriculture and food systems, using technology to create safer, more efficient and sustainable ways of operating. To deliver its goals, the organization needed to break away from the restrictions of a three-tiered infrastructure and move to a form of software-driven IT that could support a mix of private and public clouds.
Olam chose a Nutanix Cloud Platform, unifying management across clouds and gaining the performance and reliability for all its mission-critical workloads. The company, which successfully scaled the platform to support 95% of applications, is now driving its end-to-end digital transformation strategy using Nutanix.
When the COVID pandemic struck, Olam was able to react quickly through the Nutanix Cloud Platform, ramping up the virtual desktop infrastructure to support 1,500 remote workers, gaining 100% end-user satisfaction across the business.
Today, using Nutanix software, Olam ensures 99.999% availability and has reduced IT incidents by 85%. Server utilization has risen to 70% while infrastructure costs have fallen 30%.
“With Nutanix, we are digitally transforming the agri-business, improving the quality of produce and the sustainability of production while giving many farmers a first-time opportunity to improve yields,” said Thiagaraja Manikandan, President & Group CIO/CTO, Olam International.
Another example is IBF Futures, a Taiwan-based futures trading firm providing a platform for international and domestic futures trading wanted to modernize its IT systems to streamline the customer trading experience.
IBF Futures also wanted to cut its reliance on physical machines and free-up space on premises, and in doing so reduce its carbon footprint. Total cost of ownership has been reduced by 65% (storage) and 95% (machine space).
Stricter regulations from the Financial Supervisory Commission in Taiwan also meant that the firm needed to implement two-factor authentication. According to Chao-Hsin Liao, Deputy General Manager of IT, IBF Holdings, the parent company of IBF Futures, the shift to a flexible and scalable cloud-based platform had made it easy for the IT team to deploy a one-time password SMS system for enhanced security.
“Since adopting Nutanix’s services, we have saved significant time and manpower. We plan to launch a cloud-based service built on the hyper-converged infrastructure. Users will gain access to historical transaction data on the platform that will support their investment decisions,” said Liao.
Speed and cost of cloud migration
A hybrid cloud model is the preferred model for organizations looking to modernize their IT environment, offering all the advantages of on-premises cloud, with the ability to meet regulatory and compliance issues, combined with the cost-effectiveness and scalability of the public cloud.
With hybrid multi-cloud becoming the model of choice in cloud journeys, Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) is a hybrid multi-cloud platform that enables organizations to run applications in private or multiple public clouds, all operated as a single cloud.
NC2 addresses this issue at the core itself. It empowers IT operators to seamlessly manage and migrate VMs, containers, and applications without expensive retooling or reworking, delivering freedom from cloud lock-in.
NC2 is currently available over AWS (region-wide) and Azure in APAC (Singapore and Australia).
Talent crunch
One of the most common challenges for organizations in the region is the talent crunch. Journey to the cloud added to this problem, as skillsets and capabilities required for effective cloud migration and management are different from traditional IT.
Without the need for retooling or restructuring, NC2 offers a seamless solution that reduces cost and stabilizes the cloud journey for organizations.
As a unified stack, HCI simplifies management of infrastructure. The same tools and policies used in an HCI environment can be applied to the multi-cloud environment, so organizations have less concern about talent requirements.
Edge computing
Edge computing is gaining momentum in the Asia Pacific region, and HCI is seen as a key enabler for this trend. Companies in the region are increasingly adopting HCI solutions to support their edge computing initiatives, which have also created additional challenges and opportunities.
That’s why Nutanix has developed AI-powered solution to automate and orchestrate apps and data from core to edge and vice versa.
Ben Tobgui, Group Head, Infrastructure and Operations, Forever New, is responsible for maintaining and transforming the core infrastructure that supports the fashion retailer’s 400 storefronts spread across 24 countries, as well as its corporate offices, warehouses, and e-commerce site.
Forever New implemented Nutanix to futureproof its infrastructure, accelerate its hybrid multi-cloud strategy, and lay the foundations for a customer-first, omnichannel experience.
It is already using a single pane of glass for hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure, and leveraging more Nutanix technologies to also gain single-pane-of-glass visibility of customers across multiple channels. “The simplicity and cost-savings are true, and not just a dream,” Tobgui confirmed.
“The key is to make all these seamless,” said Daryush Ashjari, Vice President, Sales Engineering, APJ, Nutanix. “For instance, the newly announced Nutanix Central manages everything at an aggregation point from a single pane of glass. Users have the flexibility to run any application anywhere, according to their needs.”
He added: “The bottom line is to build a sustainable platform on a multi-cloud model, and operate cost-effective solutions. Be aware of the obstacles and roadblocks in the journey to the cloud, and build as resilient an infrastructure as possible.”
