The Simplicity of HCI Helps Businesses Manage Rapid Growth

The Technology Goes Above and Beyond

When companies first started to deploy HCI, it was like a test kitchen, explains Laura DiDio, principal of Information Technology Intelligence Consulting. Businesses often put it in secondary or tertiary workloads in the data center to see how it worked.

“Now it has moved up the food chain, and they are using it for the more complex, demanding applications,” she says. “Because when you deploy it right, it can be a very powerful solution. That’s where the name comes from: You’re converging technologies, and you’re putting them into hyperdrive.”

That was the case for NetDocuments. The company had originally purchased Nutanix HCI for a specific set of workloads, but soon after, it needed to scale a high-traffic, high-volume search engine running on virtual machines, and it didn’t have enough physical machines to scale it to the degree needed. 

Since the Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure was available, the company spun up the search engine on it as a stopgap, with plans to order new servers.

“We ended up not ordering them, because the search engine ran considerably better on Nutanix than it did on the hardware,” Barnhill says.

NetDocuments Takes Steps to Expand Its Stack

NetDocuments experimented with some other applications on the Nutanix equipment and saw performance increases across the board. “When we saw how well it ran on the newer e­quipment, and then you layered on all of the administrative and the risk management benefits, it painted a pretty compelling picture,” he says. “So, we stepped deeper and faster into Nutanix than we intended to.”

Most of NetDocuments’ platform is now already on that hyperconverged stack, and the company plans to be at 100 percent within 18 months. “And it just takes a small team to take care of the global platform,” says Barnhill.

Barnhill inherited an infrastructure at NetDocuments in 2016 that was running virtual machines on hardware, but it didn’t have a proper shared storage architecture that would enable migrating a running machine from one server to another. If a single server running 25 virtual machines died, those VMs would go down while being transitioned to a new piece of hardware.

“Nutanix took away that risk for me,” Barnhill says, “because the operation of those machines is not tied to a potentially faulty piece of hardware.”

MORE FROM BIZTECH: Learn how to prep for an HCI launch.

Keeping It Simple with HCI

Another major driver in NetDocuments’ move to HCI was ­simplicity. At his previous job, Barnhill had separate network, hardware and storage teams. “Here, I have one team that had to take care of all of that, so I needed a degree of simplicity,” he says.

When he began looking at solutions, many were just traditional storage stacks combined with some new technologies from other vendors. “Nutanix was the only real game in town that was being delivered and engineered top to bottom by one company,” he says.

That brought the requirements for his team down to a single skill set. “Instead of creating storage, network, hardware and hypervisor experts, I just needed Nutanix experts,” he says.

Cost was a factor as well. The Nutanix AHV hypervisor had 80 percent of the features Barnhill wanted. At a prior position, he managed a far costlier, feature-rich hypervisor but only utilized about 40 percent of its offerings. “With Nutanix, you don’t feel like you’re paying for a lot of things you don’t need,” he says.

HCI also provides a more efficient use of the underlying hardware. “With virtualization, it’s like playing Tetris, meaning I can move stuff around dynamically and shape workloads to make the most efficient use of my underlying hardware,” he explains.