Powering Your Hybrid IT Strategy

Lee Caswell and Ben Greene • March 02, 2023 • 5 minute read

Hybrid IT, Enterprise Bare Metal, Channel Partners in Data Centers

The recent pandemic upped the ante on IT modernization as most organizations accelerated cloud deployments to support workforces that distributed overnight. Now as we emerge on the other side, many enterprises are reexamining their workload deployments in the face of escalating cloud costs. Indeed, Gartner^® predicts that “by 2027, 85 percent of the workload placements made until 2022 will no longer be optimal, due to changing requirements.”¹ As enterprises pursue more agile, mobile, and portable applications, IT leaders need to make quick decisions about where to house their workloads and, in so doing, reevaluate their cloud strategy.

As organizations are rethinking their infrastructure strategy, they are looking to leverage new opportunities and innovations to gain agility, simplify management, drive operational efficiencies, and better equip their IT teams with the resources and skills needed to be competitive, all while keeping costs in check. The options are overwhelming. And if placing 100 percent of your workloads in the public cloud isn’t the answer, what is?

IT workload environments aren’t “one size fits all.” Many IT leaders are finding success with hybrid IT infrastructure, where applications and data are spread and shared across a combination of on-premises, colocation, and public cloud environments, based on the unique characteristics, resource utilization, performance specifications, and security requirements of each application. Hybrid IT strategies offer a host of benefits, not the least of which is that IT leaders regain control of their data, making it easier to support a remote workforce, scale their operations, increase agility, and protect critical assets, all while being cost-efficient.

Power your hybrid environments

Migrating to a colocation data center model with an HCI-based platform, such as that offered by Nutanix, Inc. takes the benefits of the public cloud a step further. It allows organizations to scale quickly for demand, streamline data management and systems with a single pane of glass, equip remote sites, and gain access to the panoply of benefits, and it’s why Nutanix and Cyxtera have joined forces.

Cyxtera is a marquee partner with Nutanix, having achieved the Champion Service Provider status, offering deep sales, technical, and services delivery competencies and providing multiple differentiated services based on the Nutanix hybrid multicloud platform.

Cyxtera’s Enterprise Bare Metal (EBM) on-demand model allows organizations to seamlessly extend their existing colocation environments or rapidly expand into new markets without the burden of capital expenditures, lengthy implementation cycles, depreciating assets, or the need to add local staff. By combining the software-defined capabilities of Nutanix’s industry-leading HCI-based platform with Cyxtera's Enterprise bare Metal and patented Digital Exchange network fabric technology, customers benefit from highly resilient infrastructure that unlocks cloud-like agility and scale without compromising network security, reliability, or performance. Designed to meet a broad range of workload needs, the platform is available in a variety of configurations with varying number of cores, quantity of RAM, and type and number of storage drives.

Customers can take advantage of Cyxtera’s dedicated infrastructure to enable secure, low-latency connections to their own customers, on-premises environments, and other cloud services with no procurement delays. What’s more, Cyxtera’s best-in-class remote management interface, Command Center, enables customers to provision and monitor their IT infrastructure anywhere at any time — no manual setup, cabling, or onsite personnel required.

Large retail services provider saves $800k

Take the case of a large U.S.-based retail service provider, a joint customer of Cyxtera and Nutanix. This company offers a complete network of data-driven applications and tools to help brands and retailers guide consumers from shopping to buying. The company helps its clients grow by providing rich consumer insights, programmatic digital media offerings, and a suite of technology-enabled strategic consulting services, and for years hosted all their proprietary applications in an on-premises data center.

Over time, however, they found that this setup placed limits on their organizational agility and pace of innovation. Moreover, in addition to delivering applications, the IT team was tasked with maintaining the company’s entire data center environment, which made it difficult to quickly react to market changes or add new capacity as needed.

To address these challenges, the customer decided to make a dramatic shift in its IT strategy. The IT team wanted to increase agility and decrease the resources spent on infrastructure, allowing them to shift from maintaining the status quo to supporting active growth across their portfolio of technology-enabled solutions. In addition to the company’s demanding performance requirements, the IT team had a mandate to maximize flexibility, minimize capital costs, and drastically simplify their management burden. With these requirements and a short timeframe in which to achieve them, the company began searching for the perfect infrastructure partner.

Though the IT team evaluated a complete public cloud migration, the company ultimately chose Cyxtera because its global footprint, XaaS offerings, rich connectivity, and expert implementation staff met their requirements for agile, rapidly-deployed and resilient infrastructure. Specifically, they utilized Cyxtera’s Enterprise Bare Metal solution and Nutanix’s HCI platform to meet their core needs for high-performance computing. With Cyxtera and Nutanix, the company’s IT team was able to migrate applications directly to dedicated, pre-configured servers without the need for procurement of hardware, on-site deployment, or providing their own ongoing hardware maintenance. This helped to instantly unlock value by lowering the company’s TCO and cutting out costly capital expenditures.

Enterprise Bare Metal in action

By leveraging Cyxtera’s turnkey solutions with EBM, the customer was able to get the best of both worlds, increasing performance and business agility while simultaneously reducing costs. They beat their migration estimates by six months, saved $800,000 in CapEx, and were able to maintain a lean team, all while transforming their IT infrastructure and positioning their company for rapid growth.

As companies today continue to look to improve digital services for customers and employees – and deliver them more quickly – they require a wider range of infrastructure options. On-premises infrastructure can indeed address predictable IT needs, but by using Cyxtera and Nutanix’s combined solution, organizations can now benefit from a similar operational model that includes significant cost and technology efficiencies. Together, Cyxtera and Nutanix allow you to choose a complementary solution that includes the control of colocation and the agility of the public cloud.

Learn more about Cyxtera’s Enterprise Bare Metal solution and how we work with our partners to improve your operations.

¹Gartner, Workload Placement in Hybrid IT — Making Great Decisions About What, Where, When and Why, Henrique Cecci, David Cappuccio, 2 May 2022. GARTNER is the registered trademark and service mark of Gartner Inc., and/or its affiliates and has been used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

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