To centralise applications in Asia Pacific and ensure reliable Data Recovery and Backups, CBRE retired its legacy tool and implemented VMWare View VDI on Nutanix Hyper Converged Infrastructure. As a result, CBRE realized a competitive advantage in the marketplace due to reduced risk of data loss and the ability to easily scale out.
Challenges that influenced CBRE to look for a solution
CBRE is one of the premier global real estate providers in the world. They offer property services, ranging from sales and leasing, property management, and project construction management. When CBRE Group Inc. enhanced its service offerings and grew globally, this resulted in more customers, larger teams and an increased amount of data. Therefore CBRE decided to modernize their data centres to create agile IT environments that would prevent the possibility of failed backups and at the same time would provide high availability for business growth.
“By implementing Nutanix Hyper Converged Infrastructure CBRE improved application performance and reduced running costs”
CBRE was aiming to centralise a lot of the company’s applications across the region, and they needed to find a way for users to remotely access those applications. In addition, they backed up physical servers to tape. But this legacy tool was slow and inefficient. After the flooding in Brisbane in 2011, the business was lucky enough to be located at the 33rd floor so the office wasn’t flooded, but it made them think about Data Recovery and Backups. Ensuring Data Recovery and Backups with the legacy tool was uncertain, so naturally CBRE worried about failed backups in case of future disasters.
Key considerations in the decision-making process
CBRE decided to use Veeam to back up VMs locally in the Hong Kong and Sydney data centres, to back up VMs between them for redundancy and to replicate VMs between them for disaster recovery (DR). ASI Solutions BEarena has worked with VMware since 2001, and has amassed a wealth of experience in enterprise class virtualisation deployments into organisations. Efforts have been awarded by VMware and Veeam, recognising continued commitment to assisting customers in the Backup, Recovery, and Disaster Recovery areas of virtualisation.
Challenges while implementing the solution
The virtual desktop deployment was based on a traditional SAN setup, but with traditional servers and SAN, massive uplifts were required to do an upgrade which resulted in big spikes in expenditure. Therefore CBRE decided to move server workloads to the hyper converged infrastructure from Nutanix. BEarena is the first and sole Elite Partner for Nutanix in Australia and New Zealand, so the implementation of Nutanix & VMWare technology with ASI BEarena was perfect.
