Nutanix, a leader in hybrid multi-cloud computing, announced today that BUPA is harnessing Nutanix solutions to address performance, scalability, and management issues impacting its business-critical Citrix environment that supports over 5,000 users.
These issues were quickly resolved by migrating from legacy infrastructure to the Nutanix Cloud platform and Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV). Beyond this initial phase, BUPA has also begun using Nutanix Calm to fully automate the management of its DaaS computing system and allow for rapid deployment of this and other workloads to any cloud in accord with a long-term multi-cloud strategy.
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Bupa added that with DaaS computing seen as a business-critical application by leading health insurance and healthcare provider BUPA, the company had invested heavily in a state-of-the-art Citrix solution tailored to meet its exacting requirements. The legacy infrastructure supporting that software, however, was approaching the end of life, and its replacement needed to address a number of long-standing issues.
Scalability, in particular, had become a real headache requiring consensus across multiple stakeholders just to get approval for minor upgrades and changes. Even then, those changes could still take days or sometimes weeks, severely limiting BUPA’s ability to respond quickly to rapidly moving business demands. Added to this it was a very complex setup calling for expert skills across multiple disciplines just to keep the infrastructure lights on, let alone enhance or develop it further.
With DaaS computing seen as a business-critical application by leading health insurance and healthcare provider BUPA, the company had invested heavily in a state-of-the-art Citrix solution tailored to meet its exacting requirements. The legacy infrastructure supporting that software, however, was approaching the end of life, and its replacement needed to address a number of long-standing issues.
Rick Jagger, Technical Services Manager, BUPA stated: “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 multi-cloud future.”
Industry sources added that although small, the BUPA tech team is highly experienced and it didn’t take long to figure out that a switch to Nutanix Cloud Platform would be the best way forward for its Citrix DaaS solution. The configuration chosen called for Nutanix clusters for each of the two sites, to support the 3,000 existing DaaS computing users whilst also allowing for future growth. These were quickly delivered and then subsequently deployed across two sites to meet rapid failover and disaster recovery requirements.
Clients witnessed a marked improvement in desktop performance straight away and behind the scenes, Nutanix and Citrix worked to optimize the environment. More than that, the whole system was a lot simpler and easier to manage with on-demand scaling available at the press of a button and full end-to-end visibility from a single console. Support too has been streamlined with just one point of contact for all issues, whether hardware or software related, including the hypervisor.
Like most large enterprises BUPA expects the Cloud to play an increasing role in its IT strategy. It is already looking at using Calm to enable it to redeploy rather than upgrade applications in place. BUPA is also impressed by Calm’s ability to quickly deploy DaaS computing and other applications onto any cloud and, where possible, balance workloads across what could, eventually, become a global multi-cloud network supporting other parts of the BUPA business.
