Scale Your IT and Keep Pace with a Rapidly Growing Business by Moving to Hyperconverged Infrastructure

When businesses rapidly scale, it can be tough for IT and their systems to keep up. The pace of growth can add bottlenecks and complexity to the infrastructure, forcing IT teams to throw more human resources at the problem. But with the right architecture in place, IT can scale alongside the business.

Headquartered in Chennai, Maveric Systems is a niche, domain-led, BankTech solutions specialist partnering with global banks to solve business challenges through emerging technology. Our 3,000+ specialists use proven solutions and frameworks to address the most pressing CXO challenges across customer experience, digital operations, connected core, regulatory compliance, analytics, and cloud enablement. 

Across retail, corporate, and wealth management domains, we accelerate digital transformation through our inherent banking domain expertise, a customer-intimacy-led delivery model, and differentiated talent with layered competency: deep domain and tech leadership, supported by a culture of ownership, energy, and commitment to customer success. 

Our solutions are highly contextual and aimed at addressing business challenges that are unique to each bank’s transformation journey. We provide high demand technology services spanning across digital, data, analytics, core banking, as well as quality engineering streams. 

With centers of excellence for data, digital, core banking, and quality engineering, our global presence spans across 15 countries with regional delivery capabilities in Bangalore, Chennai, Dubai, London, Poland, Riyadh, and Singapore. We are currently building an extensive facility in Pune, and looking to grow our European and US delivery centers in 2022. We want to double our revenues as well as our workforce in the next three years. These are very ambitious goals, and there is a clear fact that the business can’t grow at such a phenomenal rate if our IT systems don’t evolve at the same clip. 

A Lack of Flexibility and Resiliency

Maveric used to have a typical three-tier architecture, mainly using small, standalone machines plugged into our networks. While it did have some computing power, it didn’t have clusters or nodes, meaning we couldn’t easily spin up new servers. We were finding it difficult to host different projects on the same box at all, so if we had to manage five different boxes for five separate projects, we would have to increase the size and strength of my team. 

That lack of flexibility presented difficulties in handling the deliverables, and it also made for long provisioning times. In terms of resiliency, there was no automatic failover, and we found it hard to anticipate the downtime of the server. It all made for a complex system to manage that we couldn’t scale beyond a certain point. 

We needed to consolidate multiple hypervisors into a single environment, and we knew hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) was the way to go.

One Solution for Easier Management and Improved Scalability

Back in 2016, when this project started, we spoke to the team Nutanix. Their pre-sales rep walked us through Nutanix’s features compared to the other hypervisor environments on the market. One feature that stood out immediately was Prism Central, which would allow us to manage multiple clusters from a single location.  

Nutanix’s health model would also give us the foresight to see our future needs based on our current usage. It tells you if you’re in danger of overutilizing—or underutilizing—your VMs. This insight gives you the ability to optimize resources while scaling to meet evolving business needs. From a management perspective, that is of great value. Operationally, there was also a cost benefit of needing fewer people to manage projects. So almost five years ago, we decided to adopt Nutanix and were one of the first companies in the southern part of India to do so. 

After adopting Nutanix’s Prism Central interface, management became much more straightforward. There are never any compatibility issues or downtime when we perform an upgrade, and it happens with a single click. Given that I can run my applications on Nutanix’s built-in hypervisor, AHV, I’ve also saved costs. Instead of buying a box that has a set lifespan, then adding a hypervisor and multiple layers on top of it, Nutanix offers a robust solution bundled into one box. That saves me the need to buy additional hypervisors. 

We can build all flavours of operating systems on top of AHV. Our current workloads include Active Directory, our patch management solution, and internal apps for various departments like HR and finance, such as Oracle Financials. We host our business unit’s entire core banking solution, and our clients' environments with their consent, on Nutanix today. Our project and client environments, as well as our VDI and VPN solutions also run on Nutanix.

Because we don’t need additional hypervisors, we rely on a single point of support rather than going to various vendors. Troubleshooting used to be a time-consuming, wasteful process for us, partly because we had to get so many support teams on a call. Now, it’s just a two-way conversation with Nutanix, and we’ve built a great relationship with them over the years.

We’re Always Prepared with Nutanix

In 2019, we decided to go deeper into Nutanix, expanding from six to 12 nodes. Before that, we were still operating with some stand-in boxes, but after experiencing the benefits of HCI, we told management we didn’t want to go back. Instead, we presented a proposal to deploy all our servers on a single Nutanix cluster to manage everything with ease. We showed that with such a plan, we would see ROI within three years. 

Little did we know when we moved entirely to Nutanix in 2019 how important it would be to have VDI and VPN running on Nutanix. We had no idea that in a few months, everyone would need to work from home because of the pandemic. India went into a lockdown in March 2020, and nearly our entire team has seamlessly worked from home ever since. That decision to invest further in Nutanix paid off, as our clients are delighted with the performance that we’ve delivered during the pandemic.

We recently decided to expand our Nutanix environment once again to improve our disaster recovery (DR). Nutanix provides automatic failovers, so if one cluster goes down, our other cluster is up and running, with barely a dip in performance. Additionally, Nutanix offers a domain protection service that is a unique feature of Nutanix. 

Now, we are looking at buying another cluster for our expansion in Pune. Chennai is our head office and primary data center, and Bangalore serves as our secondary data center. The idea is to connect Chennai, Bangalore, and Pune on Nutanix, with Pune becoming our backup data center, utilizing Nutanix’s instant replication and DR mode to avoid downtime. Having DR within the same Nutanix environment, without relying on more third-party vendors, removes complication and finger-pointing. 

Acknowledging the realities of climate change and business uncertainty, we think it’s important to maintain three DR sites. If both Chennai and Bangalore were to flood, for example, Pune would be safe. The game is changing, and a dynamic, growing business like ours can’t risk being caught off guard. By using Nutanix for DR, our third data center will ensure critical business can continue while we bring our primary and secondary data centers back online.

More Than Just a Product, Nutanix Is a Partner

Nutanix has provided a scalable, flexible, reliable solution that has increased visibility, and it’s something that even new team members can understand and start using quickly. 

Nutanix is a resilient system, and it’s also an evolving product. Since 2016, I’ve seen how Nutanix has kept up with changing needs around security. Hosting client data on our server is made possible with the encryption and data transfer protocols Nutanix has put in place. Clients can rest assured that we meet all regulatory security requirements and that their data is safe. 

Nutanix has also been a great partner. Their support, from pre-sales to account management to the technical team, is outstanding. Whenever we need them, including when we’ve wanted customized solutions, they’ve supported us in whatever way they can. I know they value our partnership, and that’s part of the reason we keep going back to them. 

Given our current scale and ambitions for the future, Maveric needs the best technology and a stellar technology partner. Nutanix fits our bill, enabling our IT environment to grow and respond quickly to our evolving business needs.