Nutanix Inc, a provider of private cloud, hybrid and multi-cloud computing solutions, has announced that Osool, an independent, fully-fledged asset management company based in Bahrain, has successfully deployed Nutanix’ Xi Leap – a flexible, cloud-based DR-As-a-Service (DRaaS) solution. The service, that meets the industry standard compliance attestations expected for a financial institution’s own compliance standards, has reduced the company’s DR cost by about 65% and also helped Osool meet mandatory recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) requirements.
Abdulla Othman Al Rowaiei, Head of Information Technology, Osool said: “Infrastructure outages and disruptions continue to be common occurrences for many organisations and are costly for businesses. As a financial institution it is of utmost importance that our business is up and running at all times. Our traditional on-premise DR solution besides being costly to operate and maintain, was cumbersome to manage and there were also scalability issues. After much deliberation, we decided that using a DR-As-a-Service solution like Xi Leap was the best way forward. The solution has not only eliminated all of the complexity, but also helped enable our company to realised sizeable TCO savings, besides meeting our security and compliance requirements.”
As part of Osool’s Digital Transformation initiative, it began using Nutanix a few years back as a replacement for its existing server infrastructure. Osool saw Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) as a major stepping-stone on its journey to cloud, but also realised that it would have to change its approach toward data protection and DR to match its new HCI-based architecture. The company’s previous DR infrastructure had several cost-related issues including increased CAPEX spending, physical data space for the hardware, and increased maintenance and support costs. The on-premises DR implementation also created a separate management silo, which was an additional burden for the IT team. There were also concerns about the scalability of the setup.
Osool shifted from its traditional DR to the Nutanix Xi Leap service in less than two weeks – considerably faster than its previous setup, which the company said took about six months to deploy. Xi Leap is a fully integrated DR-to-cloud solution that rapidly and intelligently protects the applications and data without the need to purchase and maintain a separate infrastructure stack.
Because it is a financial services organisation, security and compliance were key requirements for Osool. The company referenced Xi Leap’s certification for ISO 270001, ISO 27017 and ISO 27018, along with SOC 2 Type 1, as key factors that enabled it to shift the DR responsibility to a service provider.
Osool claims that the shift from traditional DR to the Xi Leap service allowed it to cut its DR cost by approximately 65%. The company used this cost savings to enhance other services and shift budget to new projects to accelerate its Digital Transformation. There were immediate management benefits given that Xi Leap’s management tools and console were integrated with the Nutanix Prism interface, which Osool was already using for its HCI management and the team was able to set up DR and initiate failover operations immediately with no learning curve to overcome. In its tests, Osool found that Xi Leap was able to handle its larger SQL databases with no issues and noted that its end users had a seamless experience after a failover test moved operations to the Xi Leap cloud. Osool was able to meet its mandatory RPO and RTO requirements using the new DR service.
The benefits of DR-As-a-service have been well documented. Infrastructure outages and disruptions continue to be common occurrences for many organisations. In 451 Research’s recent ‘Voice of The Enterprise, Data Management and Disaster Recovery 2020’ study, 30% of respondents reported that they had suffered an outage in the past two years. And outages are costly for businesses. The study found that nearly half the respondents had outages that cost their organisations over US$100,000.
Aaron White, Senior Sales Director, Middle East and Turkey, Nutanix said: “High costs and complexity continue to be two major challenges that prevent organisations from meeting their resiliency goals using traditional on-premises DR deployments. In recent years, cloud-based DR services have grown in popularity because they take advantage of the elastic capacity of cloud service providers and can keep costs down since expensive compute, storage and networking resources are only called into action when a disaster happens. An additional benefit of cloud-based DR is simplified testing, which not only provides customers with peace of mind, but also reduces the amount of work IT professionals need to dedicate to DR implementation maintenance.”
White added that: “We commend Osool on the company’s forward thinking mindset of employing a future-proof DR-as-a-service technology solution like Xi Leap that helps provide always-on availability of applications and services and peace of mind to the IT team. We look forward to enlarging our technology engagement with the company in time to come.”
