Fitness First picks Nutanix ahead of HP and VMware for private cloud

Standardising on Microsoft and running a private cloud on Nutanix has increased flexibility and reduced costs

Global health club Fitness First has picked Nutanix's hyper-converged infrastructure to build a private Microsoft-based cloud to run the company's IT - beating alternatives from VMware and HP.

Jon Forster, global programme manager for data centre migration and disaster recovery at the keep-fit chain, attributed the decision partly to Nutanix's "solid user base", as well as its technology.

Forster said he was brought into the company to determine where it should go with its hosting technologies and architecture. He said that he wanted to ensure that the technologies incorporated simplicity, flexibility and low costs as part of the company's global data centre migration programme.

The company, which has one million customers across 370 clubs in 16 countries, has three global data centres - one in Amsterdam and two in Australia.

"All of the production services run on 'physical tin' and the non-production [services] run on a mix of physical, and either Hyper-V or VMware. It was a classic hardware server-SAN [storage area network] type set-up, but it wasn't ticking any of the three principles I outlined, particularly around the flexibility that the business needed," Forster told Computing.

"If you want to stand up a server, and if it's a new bit of tin, it takes a lot of time. It's complicated, you have to think about how big it will be in three years' time," he added.

After undertaking a comprehensive overview of the apps that Fitness First was using, Forster said that it was clear it was a Microsoft house, so he put forward the idea that the business should standardise on Microsoft technologies. This would mean that its operating system, database and hypervisor layer - which was provided by VMware - would all be Microsoft-based.

The next step for Forster was to look at cloud-based technologies. He said that a completely cloud-based set-up was looked at it, but wasn't seen as being cost-effective and didn't allow the company the type of control it wanted over its architecture.

"We wanted to have our own on-premise cloud, and we certainly wanted to be virtualised, but to have a hybrid cloud was seen as the best solution from a cost and flexibility perspective," he said.

After this decision was made, Forster had to consider what the best underlying architecture to support a hybrid cloud would be. He said that the solution had to co-exist with Microsoft's Hyper-V utility and Azure public cloud, as well as helping to simplify the amount of technologies Fitness First had in place.

"That's where hyper convergence starts looking interesting because it takes out layers of complexity. It's all very much in one box, so there is no gap between the SAN and server infrastructure, where one goes faster than the other," he said.

Fitness First looked at hyper convergence options from VMware and HP, but Nutanix's virtual computing platform stood out from its rivals, he said.

"We had to make sure it was a proven technology and had flexibility built into it. So HP might get there, but they are not there yet. Nutanix have got a solid user-base and people use it in live environments, not just in test and development environments," Forster said.

Forster took it upon himself to find out more from one of Nutanix's customers, LA Fitness in the US. "I spoke with its head of architecture and he was very happy with them," said Forster.

Before making the decision, the company conducted a test, whereby it took two of its main apps to Microsoft and installed them on Nutanix hardware. According to Forster, the results were positive, and a proof of concept was completed in four weeks over the Christmas season. One of the benefits of this for Forster was the interaction he had with the Nutanix team.

"They were very honest. They shared everything - all of their statistics and number of instances they've had over the past two years, and I also met with the CEO of Nutanix [Dheeraj Panday], who gave me confidence that the company was going to be there in 10 years' time, and that their focus was on retaining their customers, not just looking for the next one," he said.

The decision was given the go-ahead by Fitness First's CIO and the company contracted Nutanix Global Services (GSO) to implement the Nutanix product.

"They basically configured the whole thing. They picked their dates and have been in touch with any issues so that we can help to sort them out - nothing major just minor issues. Now we can stand up VMs in that environment and, in the meantime, we have continued to test the latest version of those systems, and the latest version of the operating system - everything we're putting in is the latest and greatest of Microsoft," Forster said.

Fitness First will use the Microsoft Azure Pack Service Bus to integrate with the Azure public cloud - enabling the company to use the cloud for back-up and recovery. Its private cloud will include features such as self-service provisioning of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) VMs and the use of SQL Server on Demand.

He added that it helped that Nutanix has reference architecture with Microsoft, and that Nutanix takes control over the whole process. "They look after everything, they don't say ‘if you have a problem with hardware, call someone else', they take it all on, so it ticked the simplicity box from the support side," he said.

Computing's Data Centre Summit 2015 is on 23 September at The Waldorf Hilton in London.