Nutanix claims that George Best Belfast City Airport has halved IT operational costs in the data centre as well as enhanced performance, security and availability to cope with rapidly escalating post-Covid business demand by migrating its legacy IT infrastructure to Nutanix Enterprise Cloud.
With the job of enhancing the airport’s IT services to cope with growth whilst, at the same time, cutting escalating costs, newly appointed Director of Information Technology Brian Roche realised the need for a lot more than a simple hardware upgrade.
Roche said: “It wasn’t just a matter of replacing the infrastructure we needed to move away from the existing managed service model as it was no longer delivering value for money. We also identified significant opportunities to enhance our backup and disaster recovery processes.”
“We briefly considered migration to the Cloud, but with fairly static data volumes it didn’t make economic sense. Instead, we decided to stay on-premise for now and switch to a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) able to deliver the same kind of scalability and ease of management, but on our own terms, including the ability to adopt a more hybrid approach.”
Following a competitive tender process, Roche and the team turned to Nutanix partner Leaf IT to assist with the migration. This started with the installation of two Nutanix Enterprise Cloud clusters each running the Nutanix AHV hypervisor, included at no extra cost as part of the standard software stack.
“Most tenders specified VMware”, said Roche. “The Leaf IT/Nutanix bid, however, recommended no-cost AHV which meant we could equip both our primary datacentre and a new DR site for half the cost of just one using those alternatives.”
Another benefit was the integrated Prism Central management technology enabling the airport to move from a costly managed service model to in-house management.
“Thanks to Nutanix Prism Central, anyone in the IT team can provision new VMs, processors and storage across both clusters and do that on-demand”, said Roche.
“That not only makes us more agile compared to using an MSP but saves on operational costs without impacting service levels. Plus, we can still escalate more complex issues to Leaf IT and Nutanix, with both organisations having proved very responsive in the past.”
Deployed at the height of the Covid-19 restrictions, the Nutanix installation was completed with no disruption to airport services, taking just two weeks .
Belfast City Airport was seriously impacted by COVID-19.
Among plans is the migration of the main Airport Operational Database to a flat-file system to simplify management and reduce licensing overheads. An Apache Spark data analytics rollout is now also possible on top of which the support team is deploying 5G and building a secure 5G private network to automate baggage handling, passenger movements and other tasks across the airport site.
“Businesses everywhere are transforming the way they provision and manage their data centre operations”, said Dom Poloniecki, Vice President and General Manager, Western Europe & Africa, Nutanix. Not only changing technologies but reorganising people, processes and organisational roles. Some are shifting entirely to the Cloud while others, like Belfast City Airport, are staying on-premise with yet more opting for a hybrid approach. Whatever the model, however, Nutanix has the tools to turn these plans into reality in a straightforward way, with tools that span and integrate the different technologies enabling customers to make business-centric rather than purely technology-led decisions.”
