Edward O’Connor, Chief Technology Officer of Continent 8 Technologies
In late 2023, Broadcom finalised its acquisition of VMware. This has affected many organisations within the igaming and online sports betting sector, leading to companies such as Continent 8 Technologies to consider alternative virtualisation solutions for their internal IT and enterprise needs.
With this in mind, SBC News spoke to the company’s Chief Technology Officer Edward O’Connor regarding their strategic business decisions, as well as the internal transition from VMware’s Cloud Foundation platform to Nutanix’s Acropolis and Acropolis hypervisor (AHV) platforms for internal workloads.
SBC News: What prompted the move to Nutanix?
Edward O’Connor: For us, the decision was influenced by several factors. First, our longstanding relationship with Nutanix was key. We have been a customer of Nutanix since around 2016 and we have seen this collaboration grow tremendously, especially over the last two years.
Second, a unified and consolidated platform across all our various environments was critical. Managing a variety of infrastructure environments, especially in a multi-vendor context, can become increasingly complex and expensive.
We have deployed Nutanix-certified hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) in our shared customer hosting environments, so moving to this same model for our internal need offered a considerable advantage. Third was VMware’s evolving business change, which was a critical factor in our decision-making process.
It would also be important to mention the security considerations as well. As with most large IT environments, our cybersecurity and operations teams dedicate considerable effort to patching, securing and hardening our environments. Nutanix’s background in private data management and data optimisation reassured us in our adoption of AHV.
SBCN: How was the migration process for Continent 8?
EO: Our Nutanix AHV hypervisor migration project began in CQ4 2023, auditing and selecting which of our internal IT workloads could and should be moved. The initial phase involved consolidating numerous internal virtual machines (VMs) across our global corporate data centres, which are co-located with our office sites.
The migration involved moving away from a Unified Computing System (UCS) platform – a typical three-tier architecture with external storage area network (SAN), external storage and dedicated networking appliances – to a Nutanix HCI-based platform integrated into our existing network fabric. The migration allowed us to decrease the physical footprint while enhancing our capacity and performance, resulting in greater efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
The project was designed to accommodate thousands of VMs, featuring a diverse range of environments from Linux to Microsoft, and VMs of various sizes up to multiple terabytes. It’s been a fun project and it’s been seamless as well.
SBCN: A common question that is asked is if there are service outages? Will there be disruptions to the business operation?
EO: The primary concern we hear from our customers pertains to the downtime scenario.
In our case, we really evaluated the cost of change against the cost of ongoing maintenance. Our long-term goal is to consolidate and simplify our infrastructure, use common building blocks around all environments thereby reducing outages and the cognitive load and overhead on our operations teams.
This isn’t about rigid uniformity either, we select platforms that can easily scale and partners that have flexible integration options and who are open to aligning their development roadmap with ours.
Our internal migration project was also widely visible across all departments, while our cloud team and assigned Project Managers owned the ‘getting to done’ aspect. They really brought all internal ‘systems’ owners together and were disciplined in identifying what was/wasn’t or could be virtualised, its function and priority in the running of our business, a migration effort and scheduling around the move window. Preparation was crucial during the migration phase.
A key strategy for us was enrolling our cloud team in the Nutanix certification program at the beginning of the migration. Now, six to eight months later, over 15 team members have achieved Nutanix certification, ranging from associate, professional and even master-level within our company. The majority have come from managing AWS and VMWare-centric environments in the past – the team have done a great job.
SBCN: What would you recommend to those who are interested in their own migration journey?
EO: Choose a partner whose roadmap aligns with your own technical strategy and one who you believe can facilitate the integration of desired technologies, whether that be hardware, software or managed services providers. This will allow you to be confident and aggressive on your goals and be disciplined about your business decisions.
The longer you sit on technical debt and legacy infrastructure or continue to work with partners whose business models have evolved away from your objectives and cost threshold, the more challenging migration will become.
Our own personal migration experience has proved critical in our ability to support our customers as we’re already supporting several of the leading igaming and online sports betting operators and suppliers in their own migration journey.
For those interested in a free discovery call, please visit Continent 8’s ‘Assessing your VMware Ecosystem’ page to begin the exploration process.