Syntell gets a new IT infrastructure platform | ET Works
Case Study

Syntell gets a new IT infrastructure platform

Syntell required a new IT infrastructure platform for business-critical IT services. The workloads on the platform needed to be highly available and protected against hardware failure to comply with stringent SLA requirements supporting key customer-facing services.

“The Nutanix solution supplied by ET gives Syntell an IT infrastructure platform that delivers the levels of flexibility and agility that our business demands as well as being highly resilient to avoid costly downtime. As our business grows we can easily add more capacity as well as extending new features such as site-to-site replication. Acropolis has made management of the whole solution really easy for us with single-click access to features and a central view of system status to flag up any problems.”

— Etienne Visagie, Infrastructure Manager, E-Commerce and Group IT

The Challenge

Syntell is a leading South African technology company with a rich pedigree in providing practical & innovative technology-based services & systems that enable effective administration at local, provincial and national government level.

Syntell was founded in 2003 through a management buy-out of a division of Tellumat (Pty) Ltd (previously Plessey South Africa). Over the years, Syntell has grown to become a respected partner to various government departments, local and national, whilst simultaneously building a portfolio of international clients. Key business units and areas of speciality are Road Safety, Traffic Management and Revenue Systems.

Due to growing client demand for Syntell’s services, coupled with a need to provide a highly resilient infrastructure that was easier to manage than existing 3-tier systems(consisting of servers, SAN fabric and shared storage), the IT department looked to Eurotech’s offering of a Next-Generation Datacentre based on Nutanix technology. The current environment would be supplemented by a highly scalable and flexible Nutanix cluster running the fully integrated Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV), which would give Syntell a single management pane for the entire infrastructure stack, including the provisioning and management of virtual machines. Furthermore, Nutanix’s node-based architecture allowed for easy scalability through the addition of computing and storage to the cluster as and when new client projects demanded it, providing Syntell with the needed business flexibility and agility.

The Solution

  • Nutanix NX-1065-G4 nodes
  • Integrated storage memory and compute
  • NX-6035C storage-only nodes
  • Single hyper-converged cluster
  • Managed centrally through Nutanix’s Prism management interface
  • Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV)

ET worked closely with Syntell and Nutanix to assess the business requirements and to architect an appropriate IT solution. Along with the implementation of the hyper-converged Nutanix infrastructure, it was decided to migrate from Hyper-V to Acropolis to give Syntell the ability to leverage all of the benefits of a fully-integrated end-to-end software-defined architecture. The Nutanix solution provided the needed flexibility, scalability, ease of management and high availability that Syntell demanded.

The Benefits

Scalable, flexible, highly resilient datacentre infrastructure for mission-critical workloads. Seamless future DR integration with secondary sites.

 

 

 

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