Riding the Wave: How Nutanix Helped BonusHub Improve Uptime, Resiliency, and Flexibility

Business growth can be tough to predict and sometimes even more challenging to control. Scale comes unannounced in many ways, and when it does, you don’t want to be caught off guard. Instead, you need to be able to ride the wave effectively—and not get pulled under.

Moving away from traditional three-tier architecture allowed BonusHub to gain more flexibility and stability, allowing us to ride the wave of supercharged growth with ease.

A More Flexible Payment Solution for Millions of People

Banks aren’t always at the cutting edge of technology, but as payments have become more complex and diverse, our customers wanted a platform for their merchants to accept payments from their customers in any form. I founded BonusHub to fill that need. As a digital payment service platform with limitless integrations, BonusHub ensures banks’ merchants are always in tune with the latest payment options and additional services, such as loyalty and affordability. 

According to Dilip Asbe, CEO of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), growth for individual digital payment users is set to triple in five years to 750 million. And riding this wave, BonusHub has been on a steady growth trajectory, and we came out of the pandemic blazing. Our business has grown 5X in the last year, and we expect to triple it again in the next 12–18 months. India’s landscape is incredibly diverse; across our 28 states live more than three billion people with a great deal of variability in per capita income. City sizes range from less than 10,000 people to a million or more.

We have a very long tail in our market, where we offer many niche items that appeal to a broad audience. Operating under this business model requires us to ensure merchants can afford a robust array of services at their fingertips when transacting. We are constantly doing our best to ensure banks continue to have the flexibility and power they want. 

Addressing Vulnerabilities with HCI

BonusHub is a living business. Payments happen nonstop across the country, and stopping or delaying a request would be devastating. Other types of platforms have some wiggle room—if a cab driver or food delivery is late, it’s usually a mere annoyance. But if a payment doesn’t happen within a few seconds, there’s suddenly a processing backlog. Any delay leads to a traffic jam, and we can’t afford to have upset customers at merchant locations.

BonusHub relied on traditional three-tier architecture for years. It worked, but there was a single point of failure, which created a vulnerability in our system. We knew we would likely migrate to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) at some point, and that moment became clearer as we reached nearly a million transactions a day—a figure that would only grow. We wanted an infrastructure that could scale both horizontally and vertically. When thinking about ways to reduce risk while making it easy to rapidly scale our network, Nutanix came to mind.

We had known about Nutanix for some time and even met with their team in India on several occasions over the years. Nutanix has a solid reputation for stability, which was a big selling point for us, as we can’t afford to have any hiccups when deploying new infrastructure. We initially began talks with Nutanix during the pandemic, and as the dust settled and we continued to grow, we restarted that dialogue.

As they say, a good marriage starts after the wedding, and from the start, we saw that the Nutanix team moved very quickly with our Nutanix Partner Intensity Global Technologies Private Limited, deploying infrastructure, assisting us in training, and getting our team ready to use the service. Nutanix was quick and agile, offering the right, cost-effective solution at the exact time we needed. We installed Nutanix in both our primary and disaster recovery datacenters, and when our third datacenter soon opens, it will have Nutanix as well.

Adopting Nutanix allows us to walk away from that single point of failure and build virtual setups in our datacenter infrastructure on the fly, with no limits. 

Greater Growth, More Partners, and More Transactions

We have a three-node cluster that uses Nutanix AHV virtualization. Our workloads consist of a customized Windows application, Microsoft SQL database, and several Windows-based (and non-Windows based) applications, all of which we migrated to Nutanix.

We have increased network visibility through the Nutanix dashboard and can easily access relevant reports, making our environment easier to manage. Our previous architecture had multiple dashboards for various systems, and users had to have them all open to see how each performed. With Nutanix, everything sits within a single dashboard, which helps us reallocate resources and react as necessary. We have the flexibility to move fast and be more nimble.

The dashboard becomes more critical as we progress. If we didn’t have Nutanix, we would need individual dashboards for each bank, which would quickly become unwieldy. Now, we have peace of mind that we have an eye on everything, and there won’t be any delays or disruptions in transactions.

Since adopting Nutanix, we’ve seen improved uptime for critical applications by 100%. We improved our customer response time as well as our redundancy and disaster response by shrinking our RTO and RPO by at least one hour. Reducing redundancy and compression is also a huge benefit for BonusHub, saving massive amounts of storage. Nutanix improved this by nearly 500%.

A Transformative Experience for BonusHub

Nutanix has transformed the way we do business. As we add more banking partners, not only does the workload increase, but we also need to ensure that we segregate each bank against the other banks on our network. Nutanix allows us to quickly create virtual environments dedicated to each bank. Additionally, as each bank grows, boosting transactions, Nutanix will help us manage the increased load and support a high volume of business transactions without a lot of effort.

Our goal for the future is to move our Nutanix environment to the cloud, whether using Nutanix in the cloud or integrating it with AWS for even more flexibility and scale. We want to ensure that our data is safe no matter the circumstance, and Nutanix’s hybrid multicloud solutions can help us achieve this.

To run any scalable business, particularly when you can’t necessarily control or predict the scale, it’s essential to rely on partners who offer tools to help you smooth out that trajectory. Without Nutanix, it would've been much harder to offer our banks a premium service free of disruption or delays. BonusHub’s business combines technology with our commitment to our banking partners, and Nutanix gave us the infrastructure we needed to stay on top of our growth, not drown in it.